Your Adventure Begins in the Dead of Night
by signalsandsoundwaves
Summary: Alternate Title: In Which I Keep Writing the Genderswap AU Novelization Fic of My Dreams, Where Sora Is a Girl Because I Can Do Whatever I Want, Xion Gets the Character Development She Deserves, Radiant Garden's Fall Is Fleshed out More Than It Might Ever Be in Canon, Axel and Saix Have Unfinished Business, and Kairi Has a Nice Vacation-Ish in Radiant Garden. Fem!Sora. Girl!Sora.
1. Prologue: The Names of His Ghosts

Welcome back, everyone! **And to those starting this journey anew, please beware it is the second installment in a series. Go back and read Your Adventure Begins at Midday!** Otherwise you might be a wee bit lost. Thank you for your interest in my story and I hope you enjoy

Some things to know:

1\. While I will try to uphold canon as best I can, the fact is that canon has quite a few holes in it that, as a fix-it fic, I will try to patch up. And there are some notable canon divergences I'm adding in for various reasons, explained below. But the main 'beats' of the KH canon will be upheld for sure until several games from now, it's just that the steps taken to get there might be changed sometimes. Ultimately, the destination is the same.

2\. I am going to discuss some hard topics in this installment, like child abuse and mental/emotional abuse. I won't make it graphic, yet this is gonna still get a little dark! The road will not be easy, but a rising sun awaits this journey's end ;)

* * *

**?**

_Day One_

The day she began to exist would not be a day she would look back upon fondly.

She woke up with a start; A shuddering roar of a dream encircled with Light, with chains, with memories that dissolved as fast as they were made. A Dark dream that slid out of her grasp like an eel the moment she awoke and would never be reached again, leaving behind naught but an exhausted fear that coiled itself up somewhere deep within her Heart.

The first thing she knew was that she was thankful that dream had seemed to erase itself so wholly and so quickly, but she wasn't sure of why she felt that way. And the second thing she knew was that, whatever had happened, she had survived.

Survived. An odd word to choose for enduring what her memory would later on insist was simply perhaps five seconds of screeching Light and the feeling of being dragged through a torrent, all within the confines of her imagination—if it could be said to have been dreamt of at all. The girl had survived nothing. She had endured nothing. There was no story to tell.

The third thing she knew, once she had opened her eyes, was the sight of a small expanse of grass at the edge of a woods to one side and tall iron gates on the other. The sun was low, dimmed with the lateness of the day, and made her squint to try and see the two figures at the edge of the clearing embroiled in a heated discussion.

"We've been stalking this backwater dump for _weeks_, Marly," One of them gritted out. She was strikingly short next to her companion, and her blonde hair was slicked back save for two unruly tufts that stood not unlike antennae. Her grimace was oddly curved into the veneer of a smile, as though she were trying to candy-coat her waning patience. "If there was another nobody, they would've shown up by now. That stupid brownnoser's going to think something's up if we keep hanging around after the last one earlier."

"Let Saix wonder," The other replied dismissively. His long hair was lit up in a spectrum of rosy hues by the setting sun. "Suspicion alone isn't dangerous, acting on it is. And he won't do a thing unless the superior tells him to."

"I'm not so sure about that."

"We have a reasonable alibi, don't we? You and I were found here long before the new recruit along with Demyx and Luxord. This place is a veritable wellspring for powerful nobodies."

The veneer slid away at that as her grimace curdled. "Demyx? A bucket of fried chicken is more powerful than that loser."

"Humanoid nobodies, then," The corners of his mouth twitched into a faint smile. "The kind that's of more use than a lowly dusk."

"Even that's a stretch and a half—hey!" She whipped her head over as she caught sight of the girl watching them, and they made their way over.

The girl couldn't help but draw back slightly at their approach. Their strides looked casual, but almost too much so, and there was an edge to the woman's newfound smile at her that the girl couldn't help but feel something somewhere deep inside start coiling up at the sight of it. A cold tiptoeing down her back.

The girl did not know much; For all she knew, existence began the moment she opened her eyes, and whatever dream she'd dreamed had never happened at all. She did not know what fear was, or memories, or the power that buzzed beneath the surface of her skin. She did not know the storied past of the abandoned mansion whose gates she'd woken up in front of, nor that of the two approaching her, nor even her own. All the girl knew of the world—of her world—in that moment was that it consisted of iron gates on one side and a forest along the other, populated by herself and the two figures who walked as predators, as masters, as the ones whose word would define all.

She got to her feet shakily, her knees as unsteady as a fawn's, and felt her fingers tremble as she tucked strands of blonde hair behind her ears.

It was the woman who spoke first, and took the girl's chin in one gloved hand as she inspected her. The girl looked towards the crawling ivy, the rays of the sun lighting up spare insects in the air, anything to not have to look into her eyes. "What's your name, sweetheart?" That last word sounded as though it were dripping in acid. "I'm Larxene."

Her name? The girl wasn't sure. She may as well have been nothing. A ghost.

"D-don't…know."

The words were hard to shape. Her tongue felt like a useless weight behind her teeth. The man with rosy hair looked unsurprised.

"I'm Marluxia," He introduced himself, though his expression was critical. What was he thinking? "We'll be taking care of you now. We can be friends," He suggested, and the girl could not deny that while she did not know the word 'friends', the sound of it in her mind took on a pleasant feeling—an echo of happiness. Trust. The knowledge that no matter who you were or where you were, you were not alone. The knowledge that distance meant nothing so long as you remembered one another.

The girl's head still swirled with having woken up, and she blinked past the blackened fuzziness of her vision. It was hard to hear Marluxia's next words past the rush in her ears. "Do you remember anything?"

The girl swayed on her feet. She felt their hands grip her shoulders tightly. A little too tightly.

But she didn't mind that. They were 'friends', weren't they?

She closed her eyes and tried her best to remember anything at all. Even a scrap of that dream that disappeared. And…

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The girl felt a sinking feeling in her abdomen at that. That wouldn't do. She had to try a little harder. She couldn't let Marluxia and Larxene down.

She reached a little more, a little farther. A little further.

And then there was something—if pressed, the girl would only have been be able to describe it like she'd encountered a wall made of nothing but flashing lights and sound; snippets of laughter _(a girl with short red hair crouched on a shoreline somewhere with two others: A boy and girl her own age. Friends. The other girl, with unruly brown hair that never stayed put, said something that made her friends laugh and laugh and laugh)_, of plans made together _(that girl again, red-haired and pretty and more loved than she ever knew, told the silver-haired boy and the unruly-haired girl of memories of a home far beyond their tiny islands. A home they would sail to find together). _

Memories of the pieces of not just one home _("The home of the heartless, he called it?") _but two. Another home whose walls were made with the crashing of waves against sand, populated by a found family whose love was beyond the blood they did not share.

Home. Friends.

She felt a flutter at the thought of those words. For all the girl knew, existence began the moment she opened her eyes. Or, perhaps it began a little before that. Perhaps her life had begun with waking up on a faraway home marked by a strip of sand and so much water, with two friends that looked nothing like the people before her. A family to call her own. A life punctuated by the sound of waves wherever she walked.

The girl didn't know how to say all of this. She struggled to form the syllables she barely knew, and by no means understood. But she did understand enough to say but one word.

"Waves."

"Waves," Marluxia echoed, and brought a hand to his chin. Larxene's gaze went sharper at this, pondering, calculating. And suddenly the girl felt as though she gave them the wrong answer. She felt her face grow unbearably hot as she fidgeted with the hem of her colorless dress.

"Don't put an 'X' in it," Larxene warned him. "Vexen—"

"I know," Marluxia cut in smoothly with a nod, still searching the girl. "Waves, then? In that case, we shall call you 'Namine'."

* * *

**AXEL**

_Day Ninteen_

As it had turned out, the rambunctious little keyblade wielder had made a move. Several, in fact.

Nobody, and the pun was absolutely warranted, knew for sure what had gone down. Barely a month ago had Xemnas left to go to the shambling remnant called Hollow Bastion to meet with Sora herself, for the purpose of gathering data for Vexen's little pet project that had grabbed the superior's attention, and came back saying nothing of the experience beyond that it was successful. And he hadn't spoken a word of the matter since.

Hollow Bastion. Once known by another name, and once known as Axel's homeworld.

When anyone asked, not that they ever did anymore, Axel rarely had words for his life before the Organization. The new kid, Roxas, hadn't inquired much either after the first few days, what with being too busy trying to gain his footing as a nobody to really question why Axel cut off certain topics suddenly or pretended not to hear certain questions. But the kid was sharp, even when Larxene and Zexion claimed otherwise, and he was sure Roxas would put the pieces together if Axel wasn't careful.

As nobodies, their existences were severed into two periods: The time before losing their Hearts, and the time after. The former was marked by the memories of feelings—that chilling creep of fear, the quickening of a pulse with rage, with joy—that made everything else nobodies remembered of that time stand out so strongly. But even as the sensations of feelings themselves were torn away, cleaved by the Dark parentheses marking the start of their new lives, every remembered day nearly glowed with color compared to the days gone by now.

And whenever asked about the latter, the time after they'd begun donning the coat…well. Grief was hard to bear, and harder still to put into words.

But that didn't stop some from trying: Saix took up the practice of keeping a journal after the fall, and it wasn't long before there were pages and pages of fine cursive marred with the paths of water drops. If he'd managed to find the right words, Saix had confessed to him once, then the thoughts wouldn't hurt him anymore. Because once a memory was outside of yourself, safely confined within a journal, the worst it could ever do to you thereafter was a papercut. And every pain that was written away was one less pain that coiled tight inside your throat and threatened to choke you when the nights dragged on too long and too quietly.

Some of the other members, most notably the ones who could remember their lives before, took up the habit. But Axel could only fill a scarce few pages with rambling half-thoughts in the first few days of his new life, before snapping the journal shut forever and tossing it somewhere under the mess of his bed. He didn't like the feeling of that pain becoming dulled. Perhaps he was a masochist, or perhaps he was simply nostalgic—as nostalgic as a being without a Heart could be, anyway—but the ritual of returning to those memories had become a strange kind of comfort to him no matter how much they made his teeth grind or his eyes prickle. No matter how much he dug red streaks down his arms and whimpered sounds like _Isa _and _Kairi _and _Mom Dad Grandma_,rattling off the names of his ghosts.

It wasn't long after the start of their new lives that Saix had warned him about holding onto that pain. That picking scabs would only make scars. But Axel had watched the years transform the boy who had once made his Heart dance into a man made of burned bridges and wrong turns, eaten away from the inside out, and Axel wanted no part in it.

And so, Axel held onto whatever trace of feeling he could, even if it was only suffering, and told Roxas the same in his own first few days of life: To hold onto whatever he could feel, no matter what. For such was the only way nobodies truly survived.

And all Axel could do now was pray that Roxas would listen. He'd already watched Isa get changed by that slow poison of time and circumstance, he couldn't bear it if the kid was lost to it too.

But they both had work to do, and while Roxas and most of the other members were still asleep, Axel was making his way to a quiet little meeting marked strictly confidential. And he had made it a point to be fashionably late.

He didn't bother to hide his smirk at the sight of Saix's unimpressed scowl as he walked in. But that smirk died when he'd noticed Xemnas present as well.

He knew what that man could do.

The meeting chamber was empty aside from the three, and Axel's footsteps echoed as he made his way to his chair without further preamble.

"A fine time," Saix muttered sourly.

_Damn right_, Axel wanted to retort, but not with Xemnas in the room.

Instead, he went with a mild, "So what's this about?"

"As you know, Ansem—the heartless—is no more," As if it hadn't been all the Organization Thirteen could talk about for the past several days, "With all heartless activity amongst the known worlds, and presumably yet-undiscovered worlds, having ceased. The latest intelligence reports suggest the keyblade wielder and her colleagues are heading towards the research site Castle Oblivion, where Vexen has reported an erratic energy signature coming from the basement," Xemnas' eyes instantly focusing on Saix at that was not unnoticed by either of them.

But then again, that was news to Axel as well. "What's going on there? Is that why the mission's been moved up?"

"We decided to change the schedule in hopes of getting ahead of the keyblade wielder," Saix opened the manila folder and flipped through the pages, "For more opportunity to prime the castle's unique environment in preparation to get the strongest retrograde amnesiatic effect we could. You understand how useful Roxas could be, yes? Now imagine having two of him, especially one who we wouldn't have to train, who's already destroyed the strongest heartless we ever recorded. Imagine how much sooner the Organization could accomplish its goals."

_("One day he will fall, Lea, just like we did," He spat. "And then he will answer to us.")_

Most of Organization Thirteen's members would never call Axel the sentimental type—he had carefully maintained an exterior of barbed wit dealt by an even sharper tongue, with all the distance between himself and the others as much as they kept themselves.

Only Saix may have said otherwise, once. Once.

But Axel, while he'd never met Sora in-person, knew enough about her to be less than cozy with this plan. The kid was fourteen, estimated to be a biologically a year younger than her nobody—_Fourteen, isn't that the age Kairi would be now if she'd survived?—_who was already a little too young to be going on missions for Axel's liking despite his own history. A whole year younger just didn't seem right at all. Even if she had already proved herself.

"But as for the energy signature, we're not sure. It's not localized to any one area, just to the basement levels as a whole. Vexen is currently studying it as best he can, and has requested the other former apprentices to assist him."

That explained the interesting roster.

"I don't know. If I remember correctly, you were a little more accomplished with the technical side of things than I ever was."

Saix blinked. A ghost of a smile flickered at the corners of his mouth, the first anyone had seen in years.

"That is not why you were called in," Xemnas said. "We have a special task for you."

"Oh?"

"Y-yes," Saix flipped through the pages again and hid his faltering voice by clearing his throat. "I've noticed…unusual activity coming from certain members. And we have agreed that it must be investigated."

"If you haven't noticed, we're all a little unusual here. We're nobodies."

"This goes beyond mere idiosyncrasies," Saix replied, "Did you not notice Vexen's discontent at our appropriating Xion? Not to mention his choice to independently reopen the long-defunct replica project in general."

That wasn't that strange. Vexen did that sort of thing quite often. Xion hadn't done much of anything yet beyond just stand there, but probably just seeing one of his experiments even mildly work in his favor only to be taken away was enough to make the reaction understandable.

"So the man finally makes something that works and it's taken away, I'd be annoyed too."

"Xion could be quite useful for the Organization, same as Sora. Imagine what she could do for one member, never mind all of us," _Like what, _Axel supposed inwardly, _do her best impression of a coat rack? _He'd never understood their interest. The girl was a total blank slate. She hadn't even shown them her face. "Remember the original plans for the replica project?"

What had started as a study in what vessels the Heart was willing to reside in had snowballed along with the apprentices' other experiments in the beginning, into the replica project. Grand plans for easily manufactured servants, assistants in missions, whatever you could think of. But then the newly formed Organization Thirteen had discovered the dusks, and the replica project had been set aside. Until Vexen.

"I do."

"Think for a moment what enough replicas could become, now that Vexen's figured out how to make them work. A personal army. We don't know how much he's been able to program Xion yet, but we can only hope our timing was fortuitous enough to cut him off before he could create something truly dangerous. You know she was made with data collected from the superior's encounter with Sora."

"In that case, what's stopping Vexen from just making another? Now that he's already made one."

"Insufficient data," Xemnas said.

"We've found from the confiscated research that creating a functional replica is only possible when data of whoever is to be replicated is gathered firsthand. Attempting to use the same data twice doesn't work, for unknown reasons, and attempting to make a replica of a preexisting replica only results in corrupted data," Like a game of telephone, Axel imagined. Saix went on, "We've distracted him so far by directing him to stay in Castle Oblivion for now until you can go there with the others to investigate. But Vexen was not the only one."

And Axel already had an idea of who he'd bring up next. It was impossible not to notice those two withdrawing from the others and going AWOL more than usual. "Marluxia and Larxene."

"Precisely. Xigbar has reported that they've been lingering around the gates of Twilight Town's abandoned mansion, same as where they and Roxas first appeared, and very little of what he's reported has sounded harmless. There is undeniable talk of mutiny between them and it must be silenced."

"Silenced?"

Saix nodded. "It is why we're sending them to Castle Oblivion, and you as well."

Well, then.

"And I suppose you're wanting me to do the dirty work?"

But Saix shook his head. "For now we only want you to keep an eye on them. As suspicious as they are, Vexen, Larxene, and Marluxia are still of use to the Organization until the mutiny is confirmed, and if they turn out to be of no harm then their help will be invaluable to subduing the keyblade wielder. And you as well."

Axel fought the urge to cringe, and desperately tried to come up with some protest that wouldn't be misread as rebelling; Tensions seemed high enough with Saix and Xemnas as it was, and if they saw that he didn't agree with the concept then it'd be just as likely that they would send someone to investigate _him. _But unfortunately, it seemed the silence was enough to tip them off.

"We will not tell you to do anything until the time is right. For now, just investigating is enough," For now. "Remember, Axel; Above all else, we must secure the keyblade wielder."

_("And then he will answer to us.")_

A heavy look passed between the two of them, and Axel was the first to look down.

Long ago the two had sworn a duty in the ruins of a home. And in the dying light of a sun that would not set for ten years henceforth, surrounded by the Dark and the dead, two boys had made a promise.

A promise to protect. But this was not a promise to protect the living, for the living had gone away. No. This was a promise to protect that which once was.

A promise to protect a memory, and to uphold it.

A memory of parents and a grandmother. A memory with bright red hair, and a Heart of nothing but Light.

He'd never know what could have been if she had been just like anyone else. Whether the experiments would never have gone that far, and they'd still have a home with its namesake radiance. Or even, if little else, that she'd be right here beside him wearing a coat and a number too.

He would never know. But he did know how many others had so much to lose if the man who sat between them was not stopped. And, unfortunately, the only idea he had of how to accomplish that was to involve the help of a certain girl with a keyblade.

Yet he decided then that he would do it on his own terms. Not Saix's, and definitely not Xemnas'. No. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it right.

"I understand," Lea said, and let the Dark snake up around him to take him back to his room. He had to get ready.

* * *

**NAMINE**

_Day Twenty_

"_Now, let's be gone," Marluxia declared, as his fingers formed a clawing gesture towards the air. She was about to ask what he was doing, until she felt it: the faintest sensation of unease at the edge of her senses. Namine almost wouldn't have noticed it if she weren't so focused on all the newness inside and out. And then black trails followed his fingertips._

_That blackness…there was something unnatural about it. Something living. It was a blackness far unlike the color of Larxene's and Marluxia's coats, with no shine beyond the trace of blue light reflected on Marluxia's fingertips in the sunlight. And then the blackness grew into something resembling a hole in the air. _

_Larxene snickered at her. "This is only the beginning of what Darkness can do."_

_Only the beginning? Even this was already frightening, though Namine hadn't seen it do anything wrong yet; For all she knew, this Darkness did nothing beyond move them from place to place and that was all._

_But that same chill crawled up her spine again, making the mild warmth of the sun seep away as if it were never there, and Namine knew without asking that this Darkness was no good._

_By then Marluxia had already stepped through into the hole, and Larxene had one foot in while looking back at her with a raised brow. "Well? Come on."_

_Namine paused and took one last glance around the clearing. The trees, the light beaming through. The rusted ancient gates to the mansion—what was that?_

_She jumped slightly as a movement caught her eye from just behind the brick walls of the gates, but when she looked again nothing was there. The movement was almost humanlike. _

"_What's got you riled up?" Larxene said, and Namine struggled to respond. Both from lack of courage and lack of words. "Ugh, whatever. Just come on, it was probably a bird or something."_

_Namine shook her head at herself, and bit back the reflexive guilt with a shudder as she stepped through._

The days felt as though they passed in a blur of endless white walls. Larxene and Marluxia had shown her to her new room that they were kind enough to give her after they arrived into Castle Oblivion through that Dark portal, but Namine hadn't seen much of them thereafter. They said they had to go to somewhere called 'work', and to not explore much, but eventually Namine had grown too bored to stay in her room alone for hours anymore and wandered out whenever Larxene and Marluxia were gone.

She felt bad about not listening to them as much as she should. And she especially felt awful about wandering around behind their backs like this. Namine didn't know much about what having friends was supposed to be like, but she was sure not asking for permission wasn't okay, even if it was just walking outside her room.

Larxene and Marluxia had also tried to teach her how to use the Darkness, that as a 'nobody' she'd be able to use it automatically, but Namine just couldn't stand the feeling of it. And Namine felt awful about that failure as well. Yet even when Larxene grabbed her hand to guide her movements, even where the places where Larxene was holding onto her prickled silently under the skin, and then less silently as Namine's failure continued before a small crackling preceded a burning smell when her hand pinkened.

She clutched at herself tightly at the thought. Namine's friends only wanted what was best for her. And Namine would just have to get over her stupid, worthless fear of the Dark soon. Her friends depended on it.

She was wandering a little farther, now. Down some stairs, around the hallways. Namine sighed as she passed yet another pale vase on an equally pale table, both as featureless as could be. Where was all that color she saw in the memories of the girl with red hair? The blue of the sky, the green grass. Pink and lilac seashells dotting the shore. Namine almost was willing to suffer the feeling of that cold Darkness again if it meant she could go through a portal back to that place she'd first woken up in. In front of the decrepit mansion's gates.

But she didn't dare. That would be running away. Her new friends had given her so much, had given her words and a place to stay and even a name, and Namine refused to betray them like that.

Namine gave a start as she stopped and glanced around, realizing she didn't recognize where she'd wandered off to now. How many stairs had she climbed? Or had she descended them? What doors did she go through?

Namine tried rounding the corner, and felt dread at the sight of countless more doors down the latest hallway. She had to go back to her room before her friends found out what she'd done.

She bit her lip as she looked back towards the empty corridor, and then turned back to the hall. Without any better ideas, Namine decided to simply try every door to see if they'd lead the way back. If she tried every door in the castle, at least one of them had to be the door to her room, right?

Namine tried the first one. Locked. Second. Also locked. Third was unlocked, but the room was completely empty save for those same shadows faded to lilac by the overwhelming brightness. Fourth, locked. Fifth, sixth, seventh…

Locked, locked, locked.

And then came the eighth door, that opened to what looked like a small office. A desk was shoved to one wall with the chair pulled out, and stacks of papers were piled atop it. Cabinets lined up above it as the other wall had a large white slab marked with colorful streaks of erased letters and numbers and all sorts of symbols that Namine recognized a few of as belonging to math, but she could only recognize the pluses, the minuses, and the equal signs. All the rest were foreign.

But that didn't matter. Because so many of them were in _color. _

A bright red diagram for something was sketched out on the left side, with orange and green and violet crescents all along it. Some sort of an equation that was more letters and strange symbols than numbers was in bright blue. And halfway erased behind it all were smears of countless colors that practically glowed against the walls.

Namine stepped closer to the slab to see the colors closer, walking into the room entirely now, and then that's when she saw it.

In the corner, stacked taller than she was, were plastic bodies.

She jerked back and felt herself back up roughly onto the desk, and felt dread at the sound of the papers beginning to fall over and scatter to the ground with the desk's dulled screech against the floor. No, no! This was too loud, far too much noise, and Namine had to get out of here before her friends might hear it and see her out of her room _and making such a mess—_

"Who are you?" A new voice shouted, "What are you doing in here?"

Namine gasped as she spun to see a man glaring at her, his hollowed cheeks and long dishwater blonde hair only amplifying his expression. And behind him, lying on a table, was another plastic body spread out and hooked up to wires. Several screens were mounted around the table.

Oh, no. She'd been caught.

"I-I'm sorry," She begged, trying to back out of the room. "S-sorry, sorry—"

"Get out!"

And she tried, but Namine only succeeded in running into somebody else. She could feel her insides start forming knots in fear and quickly stepped back and kept her head down. The phantom pain of thorns and lightning crawled up her wrists. Marluxia had found her, she was sure of it.

But it was not Marluxia's voice who asked, "What's going on here?"

And Namine slowly looked up to see an unfamiliar head of bright red hair looking back with confusion.

"Axel," The man replied with barely restrained irritation, "I didn't expect you to be here so soon."

"Mission got moved up," Axel shrugged. "Haven't the others already arrived?"

"Not that I know of."

"Wow, was I the early one for once?"

"For once," The man gritted out, "You were. Now can you get that girl out of here? I have work to do."

"And what kind of work would that be?"

Namine got the sense that Axel was enjoying irritating the man, and it seemed the man knew it too. He scowled more.

"The kind of work I can't get done with children crawling underfoot! The data's already compromised, now get out! Both of you!"

"Fine, fine," Axel sighed and steered her back into the hallway, before closing the door behind them. "Old prick. Don't worry about him, he yells like that a lot when it comes to his work. Or anything at all. Now, who are you?"

And he said that as if it weren't any bother that she'd wandered into a lab that was clearly off-limits, made a mess in the aforementioned lab, made that man who seemed to own the lab angry, compromised that man's data—whatever that may mean—and most of all, ended up with having to have him help her.

Axel wasn't mad at all. Not even annoyed. What was going on?

The quiet dragged on and Namine realized she was supposed to answer. "N-Namine. Sorry."

"Sorry for what? Vexen's never been much fun even in the good times, he'd be pissed even if you sneezed down the hallway from his lab."

"Um," Namine wasn't sure what to say.

"So, what are you doing here? It's easy to wander around and find Vexen's cave, but Castle Oblivion?"

She wasn't supposed to be here, was she? Namine fidgeted with the hem of her dress. That would make sense if she wasn't supposed to be here, considering her friends told her not to wander off. She gnawed her lip at that reminder of Larxene and Marluxia. In all the ruckus of the lab it left her mind. They'd be extra angry if they found her wandering around with Axel, wouldn't they?

"I, um," If Namine had any idea of what to say before Axel asked that question, now she was at a loss for words. She couldn't mention Larxene and Marluxia, they'd be furious that she ratted them out. If they weren't supposed to bring her here…that made it even worse. Not only were they kind enough to give her a room, but they did it under the risk of getting in trouble? That was too much sacrifice for the likes of herself. She didn't deserve that. She didn't deserve them.

She could try asking Axel to help her find her room, but even if he was willing, then she might be getting him into trouble too. He'd already been so nice as to help her get out of the lab and away from Vexen for nothing in return, she couldn't ask for more. But she was still lost. And she was still lost in a place she wasn't supposed to be, and Larxene and Marluxia could be coming back at any time.

Namine wrung her hands over and over and didn't know she was about to cry until she felt her cheeks grow wet.

And now she was crying in front of Axel. As if this couldn't get any worse.

Her friends hated her crying the most.

"Hey, wha—" When she didn't respond Axel had angled over slightly and saw her face. "Crap, now _I_ should be sorry. Didn't know that would freak you out—Hey, really, what's wrong?"

"I-I-I couldn't find my room," Namine tried her best to not stammer, but failed. "I'm so sorry. I c-can't find my room."

"That's all?" Axel looked concerned. Why was he still not mad? "Hey, really, it's alright. We'll look for it together, okay?"

Lightning prickled under Namine's skin again as she took a shuddering breath and murmured, "Thank you."

Axel, thankfully, didn't say a word of Namine's _(stupid, so stupid) _overreaction to his question, nor did he say a word about her crying even when she continued to wipe at her face as they walked through the castle. Instead, all he talked about were funny stories of Marluxia's and Larxene's coworkers. That was new. Namine didn't know her friends had other friends.

But it made sense, didn't it? Of course she wasn't their only friend. She was silly for feeling let down at the revelation that she wasn't of as much importance to them as she thought she was.

"So Xaldin didn't give a damn and went ahead and stole some of Marluxia's roses anyways to go woo some girl with—" He grinned at her surprise, "—I have no idea who. Probably just another chick he met on a mission. But Marly was pissed! He'd been cultivating those roses for a while by then and obviously he wasn't cool with the invasion of his space too. So, to none of our surprise, when Xaldin finally came back several days later and went to bed, he woke up with this awful rash. Marluxia had left some poison ivy in his sheets long enough for their oil to seep in!"

Namine laughed. She didn't know about this side of her friends. It was nice to hear about.

Axel went on, "Saix was pissed about it too, of course. So much so that he sent Xaldin out on yet another mission immediately thereafter and lowered both Xaldin's and Marluxia's seats by what had to be six feet as their punishment—"

"Namine. There you are."

Marluxia.

Any laughter she had left immediately quieted at the sight of both him and Larxene standing in front of the opened door to her room. Namine had been caught.

"Guess we found your room," Axel said uncomfortably, and she could feel his eyes narrow at her change in mood before looking back towards Marluxia and Larxene. Neither of her friends were happy.

Would they put poison ivy in her sheets too? Or would her skin turn bright red from lightning instead?

Namine didn't know. But she knew it wouldn't be good.

And she knew that whatever happened, she deserved it.

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTE**

HEY EVERYBODY! Hello to everyone both new and returning! I have no excuse for the delay! I'm so sorry! And the illustration shall be coming shortly, as well as one other for YABAM, so hopefully that can be reparations for my lateness!

So! For those new and returning, you may be wondering what I've got in store for this one. And there's only so much I can give away without giving too much, but for a (very) basic list of things: For starters, I _will_ be going into detail on the fall of Radiant Garden! Canon never really talks about it much, which is an enormous disappointment considering that it more or less jumpstarted the Kingdom Hearts story as a whole (after all, it indirectly/directly led to the formation of Organization 13 and Kairi ending up on Destiny Island, which sort of led to Riku opening the door, which led to Sora getting the keyblade...butterfly effect, y'all. And barely anything is said of it!) Sooo...I'm going to organize my own ideas of it according to the swiss cheese of KH canon and fill in the blanks where necessary, as well as wind in my own ideas here and there for headcanons and imagined backstories where there's none to be found.

But wait, there's more! Since I'm still pissed about Nomura ditching the Final Fantasy part of KH, I'm going to try to fix that too. Unfortunately, as the FF cast of KH is currently corralled to Radiant Garden and is busy fixing it back up to its former glory, they won't appear much and not for long. But they will appear, and they will definitely come into importance in KH2 for sure. You'll see. I'm so excited about covering KH2, you guys ٩( ᐛ )و A lot of influence from FF7 is going to happen in this fic! A lot of sadness and character development and increasingly warm slow burns are going to happen in this fic! A lot of everything is going to happen in this fic!

And with that said, thank you again! Thank you for returning, and thank you for even just poking your head in and looking around, if you're new to this story. It means a lot! ٩(❛▿❛✿)۶

**NOTES:**

1\. So in canon Xemnas totally knows about Namine and therefore knows what she's capable of, which makes no sense at all that he'd leave her with proven liabilities like Larxene and Marluxia (You don't hand an atomic bomb to your enemies even if you know they're going to kill themselves with it, right? Because there's a good chance that bomb's gonna kill you too). And when we learn about the Mark of the Recusant (at least, I think that's why all the members had 'X' in their names, it would be too useful)(all canon says is that it's inspired from the X-blade), it just seems even silly that Xemnas would leave her with a name like Namine, and leave her completely untrackable beyond the reports of whoever sees her regularly while she's still in the hands of known traitors.

The more I think about how things between the Org13 and Namine went down, the less the writing holds up. There's little sense, even considering the possibility that Xemnas did want her to indirectly lead to several members' deaths with what happened (and maybe eventually his own death? based on what he said at the end of KH3). Without the Mark of the Recusant he wouldn't know her location, and that combined with her powers there would be a certainty of shit hitting the fan. It would be better for Xemnas to have kept a tighter leash on her by giving her a name with the Mark of the Recusant in it to keep her trackable, take advantage of Namine's pushover-with-longing-for-friends-but-also-anxious/depressed nature by turning her against the organization's enemies, and maybe even trying to use her to get himself free of MX's and the true organization's plans (and maybe over time Namine could slowly come into her own and get more confident, and planning and executing her own goals? IDK).

But that's an idea for a whole other fic I'm too lazy to write, cuz it'd change things throughout the series way too much for me to work it in with what I already got planned. Sooo…I'm just rewriting it so that Xemnas never knew of Namine's existence. It's easier and this way I don't have to change Days and CoM too much since they're some of the better written games in the series.

2\. I'm sorry, Larxene and Marluxia are my favorite Org13 members, but it's canon that they abused Namine :( And we know at least Larxene hit her. They're fabulous but they're evil :( :(

3\. This fic will be divided into two halves! CoM, followed by Days, with an intermission chapter in the middle. Otherwise all the POVs I'm going to follow will get super confusing!

4\. To note, there will be some worlds added/swapped! To ease Days' tedium, and for character development!

Thank you all once more ( ˊᵕˋ ) it is good to be back.


	2. Chapter 1: Tethering

As always (oopsie daisy), my utmost apologies for the tardiness! Though I suppose it's nifty that this particular chapter ended up coming out close to valentine's day ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ Thanks to selenity136 for beta reading!

* * *

**RIKU**

_Day ?_

If someone had told him a year ago that faeries were real, he would have laughed.

And if someone had told him a year ago that faeries were real and very dangerous, and sometimes could turn into dragons, he would have laughed again.

And if someone had told him a year ago what would come to transpire within the span of a month and some days—that he would succeed in finding a way off of Destiny Islands, but only by helping to destroy it, that Kairi would lose her Heart in the process and that Sora would _kill herself _just to give it back, that Riku would lose his Heart and his body and any hopes of gaining the keyblade he'd thought was rightfully his in the face of what he'd done, and that his journey of helping to kidnap people and inadvertently trying to destroy other worlds would end with him holding hands with a talking mouse and some lady he'd met for ten minutes as a little kid—he would have thought whoever told him such things was insane.

But if there was one thing Riku had learned on his journey, it was that the impossible had a way of being all too possible. And that the unlikely had a way of being far more likely than he'd ever bargained for.

And so it was that he held hands with that talking mouse and the last person he'd ever expected to encounter again in his life, Mickey and Aqua, and spoke along as their voices echoed in tandem in the middle of what was undoubtedly one of the Darkest depths of the universe.

"May your Heart be your guiding key."

_Call forth your Light in your Heart as best you can, _Aqua had instructed them. That task was thankfully far easier for Riku now than it would have been even three days ago, by his perception (as time in the Realm of Darkness had a way of both marching by and staying still), back when he had been keeping sleepless vigil over Kairi's body in Hollow Bastion. Still brainwashed then with the idea that the keyblade was his, and that Sora had stolen what was promised to him merely to use as a toy.

Ugh. It probably wasn't a good idea to keep going with that line of thought. Thinking about what he'd become would only call forth the opposite of Light, and he really didn't want to accidentally screw up the spell and somehow call forth a door to even more Darkness.

Yet it was ironic that in Hollow Bastion, the setting for a number of the Darkest moments of his life, had also set the stage for what was so far the Lightest.

Sora's fight against him when Ansem had possessed his body.

Or, more accurately, the moment where she'd won.

_Without a doubt, Ansem played for keeps. _

_There was no opening that he did not take, no mistake he didn't take advantage of, and there was even one point where he'd snatched the Kingdom Key that Sora had hurled at him before it thankfully reappeared in her hands, in a move Riku did not recognize from their spars back home. If Riku didn't think before that she had learned something new from her travels, that toss was proof. Not to mention that somewhere along the way she'd learned to plant her feet properly as well._

_But it didn't change the fact that Riku's body, possessed as it was, was stronger. And that he was faster, and with a farther reach. Yet Sora was inventive, one quality that hadn't changed a bit from their time on Destiny Islands, and she had enough tricks up her sleeves to make up for the disadvantages. _

_And it helped that the necklace was beginning to be quite the burden._

_It had begun when Riku woke up from that dream of his false Awakening—an inexplicable weight around his neck that only grew worse as the fateful day of Hollow Bastion dragged on. If it had been a minor nuisance when he was still around Donald and Goofy, and a hindrance when Riku had made that deal with Ansem, now it was as though he were carrying a boulder tied to his neck. Though to be accurate, it was Ansem who was bearing it now._

_He barely dodged in time after Sora volleyed a vicious swipe with the keyblade aimed right at his throat—the latest unusually ruthless move on her part that Riku would have never expected her to be capable of. But the maneuver did its trick; Ansem stumbled as the necklace's weight pulled on him when he leaned away. _

_And for a single moment that felt as though it stretched on forever, a terrifying and breathtaking moment where Riku was certain now that the duel would finally be decided, Ansem lost his balance. And so he began to fall._

_Until he didn't._

_Riku could feel Ansem's leg hit the floor roughly when he barely caught himself in time to bring the Dark keyblade up above his head to guard, followed by a shrieking CLANG! His ears rang with the clamor, the aftershock of the noise settling into a slowly dimming hum in his eardrums that drowned out the ever-present rumbling of the rest of the fighting in the chamber, and Riku was blinded as sparks rained down around the two from their fight._

_The necklace felt as though it were beginning to choke Ansem. And Riku could feel how Ansem was itching to grab it, undoubtedly to try and rip it off, but Sora bared down her keyblade and it was all Ansem could do to push back her keyblade and keep it where it was, lest he falter and have it slide down onto his side and leave what would be the worst wound yet._

_Sora leaned closer, the steely look in her eyes now tinged with something between hope and fear as she tried to speak to him. The deafening ringing left over from the collision had finally subsided enough for Riku to hear._

_"—The keyblade," He had never heard Sora sound so desperate as she did right then. "It never mattered, Riku."_

_If the worlds weren't ending in that moment, if Riku hadn't finally learned the truth of the Dark, he would have felt so envious. Oh, to be someone who never needed fantasy except as a plaything. What he would have given to have had that kind of luxury, to have daydreams that were only toys and not means of escape. _

_But so many of Riku's daydreams had become real, far, far too real, and so they transformed into nightmares. _

_Sora leaned in closer, and said, "It never mattered to me what sort of worlds it helped me see. It never mattered how many friends it helped me make. Because in the end I never forgot you guys."_

_She leaned in once more, and Riku couldn't help but glance down at her lips. Ansem continued to push back to no avail._

_"That's all that ever mattered in the end to me," Sora finished. "You were my favorite."_

Her favorite.

Riku had never known how badly he needed to hear those words until she said them.

Not just to hear Sora say them, though that was certainly a bonus after being mistakenly resigned to their lifelong friendship having ended, but to hear anyone say that he mattered to them. He'd ran away from home after realizing he didn't matter to his own mother, and ran straight into the arms of Maleficent and Ansem thinking he'd matter to them. Glory, power, Darkness, even the keyblade…he didn't just want those things because he was a power-hungry idiot. Though that was certainly a not-so-insignificant part of it.

Riku had wanted those things because it would mean that he mattered to people one way or another. The Dark mattered to the Light in the same way that two halves made a whole. The glorious mattered by virtue of being heroes—those who mattered to many. And those with the keyblade mattered to everything.

But in the end, all Riku had wanted was to matter to someone. Anyone. And finally he did.

And it turned out to be the one person he thought had abandoned him from the beginning.

Riku had come to know the feeling of Darkness well over his time away from Destiny Islands: Sometimes it was like the seeping coldness of a Dark portal washing over you, or the ice that crawled in your veins after a betrayal. And sometimes it was like the brutal white-hot rage that erupted in an instant. But it always, always felt corrosive.

And Riku had become so used to the Darkness eating away at him, so convinced that the sickly gnawing at his Heart was good for him, that he'd always thought the Light would feel so much worse. So on that day in Hollow Bastion, in the aftermath of Sora saying those words, so steeped was Riku still in the midst of both his own and Ansem's Darkness that he didn't realize the foreign feeling of completeness was not from the Dark at all. But rather, from the Light.

He'd only gotten a taste of it in those spare moments before the duel was decided for certain and Sora had won, hooking the tooth of her keyblade against Ansem's own to toss it aside before getting the horrible idea to stab herself with the damned thing to return Kairi's Heart—and Sora calling him her favorite would not have been anywhere near a positive memory if she hadn't managed to literally come back from the dead somehow after that particular stunt—but that Light had felt…good.

It was not the kind of 'good' that wasn't good enough to be considered 'great', and was therefore mediocre. It was anything but. The quiet profundity of that Light was so easy to miss that one could be too caught up in the cause to notice its unfurling; The feeling of a missing puzzle piece sliding into place, or the sun finally coming out from behind storm clouds. The feeling of being together.

That Light had lifted a weight from Riku that he didn't even know he had been carrying for so long.

Sora had died, and then Sora had lived. And all along, he was still her favorite, favorite, _favorite—_

"It's working!" Mickey cried, and Riku opened his eyes to look before quickly closing them again. Whatever was happening was blinding.

It took a moment, but as soon as it dimmed enough he could see that their work had resulted in a beaming shape hanging in midair. A vaguely rectangular opening that pierced the Darkness all around them and Lit up the trio's surroundings as far as Riku could see, enough to make even the mist that crowded around the rocks retreat just slightly.

A door to the Light. It had to be.

"It…worked?" Riku looked back from the opened door towards Aqua, who was wiping her brow. "Where will it take us?"

"I'm not sure," She confessed, "This magic was a lot less precise than I'd prefer, since having all three of us working to cast it gave the spell enough power to work, but at the cost of focus. I was mostly concentrating on making sure it would take you somewhere that would keep you safe."

"That's alright," Mickey replied, "Me and Riku will stick together! Wherever this door takes us doesn't matter, so long as we can find our way back to Sora and the guys to help 'em out!"

He smiled at Riku, then, and Riku couldn't help but smile back. Mickey's optimism was unshakable, even as occasionally oblivious as it was, and in a place like this Riku was thankful for it.

And maybe, he thought, it wasn't just blind optimism. Maybe it was something not too far from realism. After all, their success in opening a door out of the Realm of Darkness was now the latest in how many impossibilities coming to pass? Riku had lost count. The only two things he knew for sure right now was that one, things were finally looking up, and two, he would make damn sure not to screw them up again.

Well, there was also one last thing he was sure of: Neither he nor Mickey could be seeing Aqua again for what could be quite a while, unless the worlds got screwed up enough to where they would start falling to the Darkness again.

"Last chance," Riku offered to Aqua. "You're absolutely sure about staying here? Wherever we go, I'm sure there's room for one more."

She chuckled. "You're very sweet, but yes. I'm absolutely sure."

Riku and Mickey shared another look, and this time it was significantly less happy.

"Okay. Well," Riku wasn't sure what more he could say. "Bye for now, then," He finished awkwardly as he began to follow Mickey towards the doorway.

"See ya later, Aqua," Mickey chimed in, "We'll make our way back to get you out as soon as we can! Without either of us or any worlds falling to the Darkness required," He promised.

At that, Aqua pursed her lips. "Riku?"

"Yeah?"

"Is it okay if I just…cast a quick little spell on you before you go? Just something to reassure me, if you don't mind. It's okay if you say no."

"Sure, what is it?"

"It'll be just like earlier, when I helped connect yours and Sora's Hearts to see if she—if she was okay," The lapse in her words was not lost on either of them. "Only this time I'm going to reinforce that connection."

"Aqua?" Mickey, if possible, sounded even less sure of this idea than he had towards Aqua's request to be left behind in the Realm of Darkness. "What are you going to do?"

"Just something to give myself a little peace of mind," She reassured him. "And protect both Riku and Sora from falling to the Darkness again."

When Mickey didn't look too confident, Aqua continued, "It's something that I wish I could have had the chance to do with Terra before everything happened. Before I learned that he ended up falling to the Darkness. I know now that he's okay, or at least as much as he can be in his circumstances, but until you found me I kept thinking: What if he had help in resisting Xehanort's manipulation? If Terra didn't have to shoulder the burden of his Darkness alone, what could have changed for the bettter? Could he have passed his mark of mastery exam like he should've and taken Riku as his apprentice, and everything would have been avoided?"

Now that was a compelling argument, but Mickey didn't appear as convinced as Riku felt.

"Master Yen Sid taught me that magic isn't always the solution to your problems," Mickey replied, "I'm sure that's especially for stuff like Darkness. Terra might have fallen anyway no matter what you tried to do to prevent it."

"But we don't know that for sure," She protested. "And we do know that even with Xehanort's latest attempt to overrun the worlds with Darkness being stopped, and you two returning to the Realm of Light, then there would be only two keyblades to help protect countless worlds from the threat of heartless and whatever happens next. Riku hasn't had his formal awakening yet, or successfully summoned his own keyblade. When he does, then that will at least make three of you, but if something happens to either him or Sora again—"

"I'll do it," Riku said hastily, and they both turned with varying degrees of surprise. "If it means Sora won't die again, I'll do anything."

"But Riku," Mickey said, "You don't even know what she's going to do!"

"She said she was going to reinforce mine and Sora's connection," Riku reminded him. "And that it would keep Sora from dying again, right?" He turned to Aqua with a spark of desperate hope at this. Riku had meant every word of what he said—the worlds deserved Sora more. The worlds needed Sora more. He had screwed up enough already, hadn't he?

Now it was Aqua's turn to hesitate. "I'm not sure that it will interrupt death itself," She clarified. "But I think it could interrupt death-like states such as falling to the Darkness. A tethering charm should only be able to do so much. It's experimental, and I would normally never try it on anyone since there's so little literature about charms' effects on people aside from a few kinds, but these are desperate times. I wouldn't even suggest it otherwise."

"That's fine," Riku confirmed. "Please, do it."

"Are you really sure?" Mickey asked.

"Yes."

This time it was Riku that reached for Aqua's hand. She stared down at it with an unreadable expression, and Riku could only imagine the kind of past memories she was mired in then: Her friends. Terra. Missed opportunities and what could have been.

Riku's own journey had gone on for merely a month by now, not counting his time here, and he understood that speculative nostalgia all too well already—Far, far more than once or twice had he fantasized about how things could have turned out different. Had he said this instead of that, or that instead of this, would everything still have gone so terribly wrong? Would he and Sora have been able to work together on defeating Ansem and Maleficent? Would they have figured out a way to return Kairi's Heart back without Sora dying for it?

Those questions were only the beginning of an ever-growing list of what-ifs, and he knew they wouldn't be the last. But if there was a way to keep the worst from happening ever again, he didn't care about the cost. He didn't care about whatever danger or great unknown would arise. Because in Riku's opinion, they had already faced it.

And not only had they faced it, but they defeated it. Sora had come back from the dead once, and he was not willing to take those kinds of chances twice.

Aqua waited only momentarily to spare a glance at the still-open doorway before saying, "Alright. But make sure that you ask Sora if this is okay with her when you manage to connect. Though this was my idea, and while it's for hers and your own good, I'd feel awful doing it without permission."

"I will."

Nothing more was said as Aqua raised her remaining hand towards his chest, towards his Heart, and Riku closed his eyes.

* * *

**SORA**

_Day Twenty-Four_

The dream she had that night was an old one.

It always started the same—An evening from a time when things were so simple. Before the Light and the Dark, before the keyblade, and even before Kairi. When all that mattered were endless days spent playing on the shores of home.

She would be fighting with Riku, the good kind of fighting where the only prizes at stake were sandcastles and forts and other mock-prizes they came up with to duel over as future knights. Not the fate of worlds and countless lives, and the turning of friend to foe.

But then the blue-black night came as it always did in the dream, as silent and sure as the rising sun that would soon end it, and the beginning of many lit streetlamps dawned for the evening to mark the end of their time together for the day. Until that first long star glided down the horizon.

No matter the countless number of times over the years she had dreamed of this night, the feeling had never changed; An excitement, at first. For a shooting star always meant a wish, and little dream-Sora would always say so to little dream-Riku—_Make a wish, make a wish! _She'd insist. And the dream would go black, then, just for a moment, as they both would scrunch their little eyes shut with boundless hope.

Over the years, what Sora would wish for in that dream would change. Before all of this had happened, before even the raft, she'd just go ahead and wish for whatever it was she had wanted in the moment, like passing a test or whatever new toy was popular with her friends at the time. Then she'd wish for a new bike, or to get over the seasonal flus that kids would pass around like trading cards. And then with the advent of adolescence Sora started wishing for things like having hair like the other girls, that was pretty and not a boring brown that refused to be tamed with a brush. Sometimes she wished she had silver hair like Riku's, hair like starlight, or maybe a beautiful red like Kairi's.

And then when Riku came to them with the idea of making a raft, of leaving the islands for a place no one had ever seen before, Sora would wish _I hope we make it there. _As the construction of the raft went on and summer came closer, she would wish for other things.

_I wish we could find enough spare wood to complete the raft._

_I wish I could take that egg from the seagull's nest without it noticing. _

_I wish I could win one—no, _two _more spars against Riku tomorrow. _

Those first few nights on the gummi ship at the start of her journey with Donald and Goofy, Sora would wish for things like learning how to use the keyblade better, or to find Alice again. And then she'd wish to be reunited with her friends, to save the worlds, or to find a way to stop Maleficent. And then she'd wish for Kairi to get her Heart back. For Riku to stop being mad at her and stop using the Darkness. To find her mother in wherever the gummi ship reached next.

Then finally, in a stark departure from the beginning of their journey, for her and her friends to just go back home again and have everything go back to normal.

Sometimes her wishes came true, and sometimes they didn't. But tonight, all Sora wished for was _I want to be with my friends again. _

And now she waited until the inevitable moment when little dream-Riku would tell her to look at the downpour of shooting stars. Cue the age-old terror, that first feeling of the fear of death (that never had lost its edge with time or experience unlike all the other fears she'd faced), the timeless script of a promise made to protect on a necklace and wooden swords.

So when she heard dream-Riku say "Sora," she opened her eyes solely on routine.

Except Sora hadn't realized that this time, dream-Riku hadn't said the entire line: _Sora, look._

Within her sight, nothing had changed. The dream-sky was still striped with dream-stars falling. Everything was still basked in that unnatural glow of their light. And around the dream-streetlamp above them, dream-moths still fulfilled their tireless routine.

"Riku?" She heard her dream-self say, and then stopped. Dream-Sora hadn't said the rest of the line. It hadn't run on automatic.

This had never happened before.

She turned towards dream-Riku, who still wore the necklace in this memory a decade later, and saw that he was different this time too.

Because this time, he was not looking towards the sky like he always did. He was looking at her.

"What's going on?" She asked.

"Magic," was all dream-Riku offered in the way of an explanation, though something about the way he said that felt as though he barely understood either. "Sora," He tried again, "If there was a way for us to stay together with magic, for…probably forever until it wore off or something, and it would keep you from dying again…would you do it?"

She blinked. This part absolutely had never happened before.

"Well, yeah," She finally replied, "Of course I would. Death wasn't really fun," Sora shuddered. To be entirely accurate, she inwardly amended, it wasn't truly death she had experienced. It was being turned into a heartless. But that was no fun at all either. "But I would do it a million times over again for you and Kairi. But why are you asking?"

Dream-Riku's face softened. "I would too. Aqua had an idea."

Now this dream was beginning to get really off-script.

"She called it a 'tethering charm'," He shrugged his tiny dream-shoulders, still five years old in the memory just as she was four, "And that it would be an experiment of some sort—not the bad mad-scientist kind! Aqua mentioned wanting to do it on herself and Terra or something, but that she didn't get the chance to—but it would keep us together no matter what."

"How?"

"Magic," He explained again with a shrug. Dream-Riku was clearly an insider on the details, apparently. "I think it'll interrupt fate or something. She definitely mentioned that it would protect both of us from falling to the Darkness again—"

"I'll do it."

"Wait, really?"

She nodded. Sora had meant it when she said she would do anything to protect her friends from falling to the Darkness again, even if it meant herself falling and becoming a heartless once more. She had already watched both of them lose their Hearts, and watched Riku lose his body and become possessed as well. So if there was anything, _anything_ she could do to prevent that from happening ever again, no matter the cost, Sora would do it. She would do it a hundred times over.

_("You can't set yourself on fire trying to keep other people warm. You can't try to fix people who don't want to be fixed. And you can not keep people from falling to the Darkness when that's precisely what they want to do. Do you get what I'm tryin' to say, kid?")_

All words of Cid's warning were far from her mind. Not that she had ever really cared for that lesson in the first place.

After Agrabah, she'd had a number of sleepless nights after the reveal that Riku had chosen the path of Darkness. Of course, it hadn't been officially confirmed from Riku himself until Neverland with him setting the heartless on her and her friends, but how else was Sora supposed to register that command from Kairi that night? The implication that Riku and Maleficent were on the same side? Or what about that attempt to kidnap Pinocchio not long thereafter?

By the time Cid gave her his warning, the Darkness had already changed Sora's life. It took away her home, it took away her friends, and it took away any semblance of a normal existence she'd ever have again. All within the span of only a month. So sure, maybe his words were relevant in an ordinary world where bad people made bad decisions without any Darkness involved and that was that, you couldn't really stop them, but neither this place nor anywhere else she had come across was an ordinary world.

And it helped that now, neither this dream-Riku nor the real Riku seemed to have any interest in falling to the Darkness ever again. So technically it wasn't as if she was keeping him from making a mistake he wanted to make right this second, right?

Right?

Besides, this was all just a dream anyway. Even if she meant every word she said in it.

"I will," Sora promised. Compared to running from world to world and fighting countless heartless, and Maleficent, and Ansem, this was nothing. Compared to stabbing herself with a keyblade and turning into a heartless, this was hardly a blip. She would keep every promise she ever made to make sure Riku's eyes never turned that terrifying gold again.

"She said she didn't know what it would do," He cautioned. "So we don't know if there's any crazy side effects or curses or anything—"

"I don't care."

At that, dream-Riku stopped outright. He searched her face. But she knew he would find only the truth; That Sora really, truly did not care one bit about what may come.

After a long moment, his surprise gave away to a grin. "I didn't care, either," dream-Riku replied as he took her hand.

She grinned back, and felt her hand prickle just slightly where it held his. Like a milder version of the feeling of your fingertips warming back up after a cold day, or faint static electricity. But she said nothing of it, nor did she mention it when the feeling began to climb up her arm, and if he felt the same then he said nothing of it as well.

Around them both, the script rolled on unchanged: Dream-shooting stars continued their waltz across the night, as the dream-wooden swords still sat in the children's hands like unused props. No promise was made upon them this time, for this time it was not needed. Just as the dream-necklace still sat upon dream-Riku's throat, not removed, no dream-promise made upon it, for in the waking world it was where it belonged. A promise made, but as of yet it was not a promise kept. At least, not in whole.

But that was okay. Now, the children would make sure the promise was kept. Fate be damned, and damn any consequences of thwarting its path.

Fate was only ever a four-letter word that the weak used to convince themselves of the inevitable. For in truth it was the Heart that was the playwright of the great script of life, with _(love)_ as its pen.

* * *

**NAMINE**

_Day Twenty-Four_

The atmosphere with her friends had changed since that day Axel had led her back to her room.

It wasn't necessarily a bad change, though there were moments that Namine felt less comfortable with. Moments where anything and everything in reference to her friends' 'plans' were sharply cut off at any nearby sounds. What few jokes and praises her friends would give her were now gone, for any and all of them were in reference to those 'plans', and how good they said Namine would be for completing them.

It made for much less fun. And Namine was much less sure of when she was doing a good job and being a good friend now—all she had to go on was when her friends gave her a mostly neutral reaction to any successes she had in training. The best she'd gotten was a fleeting smile from Marluxia and Larxene on the day she had finally managed to summon a Dark portal, though that might have been because it disappeared faster than she had called it forth. She would have to try harder next time.

But at least, if nothing else, it didn't hurt so much to fail now. And that was why the new atmosphere wasn't all bad.

Because with Axel around, along with the other members assigned here who had trickled in shortly thereafter, Larxene didn't make her lightning hurt so badly. Not to the point where it left any more flowering wounds down Namine's skin. And Marluxia's thorns didn't leave too bad of marks beyond dark pink indents that faded not long thereafter. But Namine didn't like to think of these changes as being related to the other Organization members arriving—something about that idea left a bad taste in her mouth. But perhaps it was like Larxene said, that Namine wasn't doing such a terrible job of being a good friend anymore.

She had felt happier than she had ever felt before upon hearing that compliment.

And it helped that Axel didn't seem to mind being around Namine much. He always had something funny to say and didn't get mad when she messed up. Instead, he told her about all the times when he messed up too. That was her favorite part. She felt better about that knowing that she wasn't so alone. And what's more, that he messed up and nothing bad usually happened afterward.

Namine hoped that one day she might be like that too.

But really, she likely wouldn't ever be. She was just too much of a mistake. Namine wasn't good at things like Axel or her friends were. She wasn't good at much of anything beyond just staying in her room, but that was boring. Though it was fitting, wasn't it? That such a boring girl was only good at boring things. Not like the people in her memories, who were so special even when they did boring things. People with stories that made them so important, so interesting, and had friends who liked them so much. Friends who didn't leave marks on each other.

Namine was embarrassed to admit it, even in her own thoughts, but she couldn't resist exploring more and more into those memories no matter how badly her friends in the real world needed her. It was just that the memories were so _good. _

In those memories, she had friends who were happy just to see her and laughed at her jokes. She had friends, plural, that made jokes right back—not only Axel like right now. Friends that didn't get quiet afterwards or make barbed remarks that left you feeling like you did something wrong. Friends that didn't laugh in the way that made you feel like the joke instead.

But in those memories, Namine didn't just have friends. She had something that was somehow even better than that. A 'family'. Even if it was made of only one person she called 'mom'.

From what Namine figured, 'family' was like an incredibly close-knit tiny circle of best-best friends that you could relax in front of or make mistakes in front of. People who wouldn't use against you the things you trusted them with. People who loved you in the way that didn't make you feel so small.

Was this normal for nobodies? To think so much on memories?

Namine wasn't sure. Larxene and Marluxia had explained a little bit of what a nobody was in her first few days: Someone who lacked something called a Heart that made them who they were. Someone that used to be someone else before losing that Heart.

It made sense, certainly. From what little she'd seen of herself in those memories, Namine had looked quite different: Brown hair instead of blonde. Bright yellow shoes instead of pale blue sandals. And bright red clothes instead of a colorless dress.

Namine wondered if there was ever a way to be that version of herself again.

Maybe if she got better at the Dark portals, one day she could make one that took her back to that home with tanned sand and such blue skies. Where a rainbow of shells dotted the shores and brilliant green palms waved hello in the breeze, and her thoughts went so blissfully quiet from the world making enough noise to drown them out.

It was hard to dwell on whatever Namine had botched that day when she receded back into the pleasant cacophony of wildlife calls and the crashing of waves on the beach.

"—ne! _Namine!_" Larxene barked, and Namine was forcibly pulled back into the present at her friend snapping her fingers in front of her face. "Damn it, not again!"

"S-sorry."

"'S-sorry' doesn't cut it," She imitated. "Stop apologizing and start paying attention. Don't you want a Heart?"

"Yes—"

"And don't you want to do cool stuff like your friends can? Stuff like this?"

She was referring, of course, to herself and Marluxia. And to punctuate her statement, Larxene called forth just the smallest spark held between two fingertips. Namine couldn't look away from the tiny, sustained light as its crackling made something in her chest start sinking and pinpricks of remembered pain dance down her arms. For a moment, she lost the ability to speak.

But Larxene was kind enough right now to take her silence as an answer this time. And she dismissed the lightning as she lowered her hand. "Then get back to practicing. You're going to get it eventually if you just focus for longer than five minutes."

Right. Magic. Her friends had said this was supposed to be easy. Magic was one of the first things a nobody learned because everyone and everything supposedly had magic of some kind; It was like the glue that held everything in existence together. Using it was just like learning how to walk and talk. So easy a toddler could do it, except the only difference was which muscles were used—Instead of arms and legs, you used your own thoughts. You had to convince yourself to use magic, and that was precisely what made this so frustrating. It caused Namine to retreat into her memories more than once while trying and failing to learn; it was so much easier to be there instead of here.

Namine tried to hold two fingers up, just like Larxene had done moments ago, and did her best to imagine a small spark appearing between them just the same. It didn't even have to be a spark, she begged inwardly, it could be anything at all. Namine didn't care. She just wanted to be able to do it.

But nothing happened.

The seconds ticked on, and she could feel herself go hot from embarrassment.

"Fine," Larxene heaved a sigh. "Whatever. I'm sick of playing preschool, anyway."

Namine winced as Larxene pushed her chair back and stomped her way towards the door, before throwing it open and passing through. The sound of her heels clicking dimmed more and more as she got farther away, and Namine's wince did not leave her as she understood that she had screwed up yet again.

_Way to go, Namine, _she thought. _Way to go._

It was supposed to be so easy. Anyone could do it. So why couldn't she?

Namine barely lifted her head to look up as Axel appeared in the doorway.

"Having trouble again?" He leaned against the wall and waved his hand in an uncertain gesture. "Larxene was kinda…yeah."

"It's okay," She replied faster than she could think. The words had become a kind of reflex at this point. "It's not her fault."

Axel didn't respond to that, and she kept her head down to avoid his eyes.

"It's just," Namine had a bad habit of making excuses, her friends had told her so. And they were right. But when she didn't know why this was so difficult, when she didn't have the truth, what else did she have? Excuses were so easy. They had a wonderful way of taking up the space that she felt too ashamed to and helped made her feel a little less like a failure. But sometimes imagination and rationale ran out and excuses disappeared with them. "I don't know. Do I have to talk about it?"

"Do you want to?"

"Not really," She replied uncertainly.

"Then don't."

Namine glared down at her hands and inspected them. They were so different now than what she remembered; No tan, no calluses. No fingerless gloves. Even her hands' shape changed. Was that what was causing this? Did her trouble with magic stem from essentially becoming a whole other person, who required a different way of doing things?

She remembered the feeling of magic just fine—like a pleasant fizzy feeling brimming in her veins when she was excited, dimming down to a hum that lingered in the background of everything otherwise. And when the magic ran out, when fire and frost had been slung back and forth until not even specks remained, came a gnawing hollow feeling in her stomach. But that never lingered long before the hum started up again.

Namine tried flicking a hand, same as how she saw herself do it countless times before, and murmured to herself, "Maybe if I had a key."

Then it would be so much easier, wouldn't it? Namine remembered how that odd giant key she used to swing around practically shot off spells on its own from time to time. And how, without that key, in one memory of a Dark day where it had left her behind along with her other friends from before, the magic had been noticeably more sluggish when she tried to cast it with a rickety wooden sword. But even then Namine had still been able to cast magic.

Did she just need to be holding something?

"What kind of key?"

Axel's tone was casual enough on the surface, but there was something less than casual about it in that question that nagged at her. She finally looked up at him properly to be certain and found that her gut instinct was right. His eyes were focused in a slight squint.

Was that anger? Was he mad at her for something? What was that look?

"J-just remembering dumb s-stuff again," Namine clutched at her arms and tried to swallow back her stutter in vain. "I-I-I could do magic before with it."

"A key?"

"Yes—" She hoped desperately that she hadn't done something wrong again. Would Axel use lightning on her like Larxene? Or thorns, like Marluxia? "A-a big one I could s-s-swing around like a s-sword where f-fire could come out, o-or—"

"Wait, hold on," Axel pinched the bridge of his nose between his eyes and sighed. "Nami, I'm not mad."

"You're…not?"

"No! No, not at all," He replied, and now his squint was gone in exchange for visible shock when he let go. "Hey, this is just a surprise, okay? I thought you'd start to remember your past by now, I just," Axel didn't seem to be able to find the words for a moment. "I didn't think it would have something like that."

Oh. So she hadn't messed up, thank goodness.

Namine felt her shoulders drop slightly as relief set in. She glanced down at her hands again and thought of the key, and of Larxene's frustration earlier. It had been far from the first time Namine had daydreamed when she was supposed to be doing something important. "The memories keep distracting me. Every time I try to do magic, I just end up watching them over and over again instead."

"Have you told them that it's the reason why you're struggling?"

She shook her head. "I haven't told them much of anything about them," Namine said, "Whenever I tried asked them about memories at all, th-they would get angry and I didn't dare risk saying anything."

At that, Axel hesitated.

"That might be because they don't have a past like you and I do," He explained. "Not one that they can remember, anyway."

Now that was a surprise to her. "Really?"

"Yeah," Now he turned his head to stare at the empty doorway that Larxene had left through, and Namine turned to do the same. "They're not the only ones: Luxord, Demyx, and Roxas, too. None of them can remember anything from before becoming nobodies. But it's especially been a sore spot for Larxene and Marluxia."

"Why's that?"

Axel shrugged. "They feel like they forgot something really important. That's all I've ever gotten out of them about it. Have you told them about your memories of that key?"

Namine shook her head. "Should I?"

At that, Axel did not respond. There was a long pause as Axel seemed to be deciding on his answer, and Namine was trying her best not to go back to daydreaming in the meanwhile. And then he finally spoke.

"Maybe," He answered, "It could be useful."

His chair gave a dulled squeak against the floor as it was pushed back, and he still was lost in thought as his fingertips glided along the edge of the Dark portal he called forth. "Stay here for a minute," Axel called over his shoulder before stepping through and disappearing.

Namine was more than happy then to do the one thing she did best. Sitting quietly in her room.

But it wasn't long before she had to do something that Namine was far, far from the best at; Explaining what had been going on to her friends. Or to be accurate, explaining anything to them. Or to anyone, really.

"—A-and usually I'd have this…this _key_," She felt as though her throat were trying to constrict while her stomach climbed out her mouth at knowing they were paying more attention to her now than they ever had before. "I used it t-to fight all kinds of things, s-s-sometimes people," She swallowed hard at recalling an encounter with a deeply tanned man with white hair at the same shore she'd seen so many times before. There was an unimaginable amount of fear that came along with that memory whether Namine wanted to feel it or not, a fear that was frayed around the edges but no less reduced. She dug her nails into her palms to stave off the urge to cry. "But the creatures—me and my friends called them 'heartless'—came in so many shapes but always had glowing yellow eyes. They were absolutely horrible. And I became one of them once!"

"Tell me about the key you used," Marluxia ordered.

Why didn't they care about her having become a heartless?

Namine wasn't sure what sort of reaction she was expecting for that, but she somehow felt disappointed anyway. It must not have mattered. She was probably just being silly again.

"The key," She unconsciously flicked her hand out in the same way she'd seen countless times in the memories. "I-It was this giant key I held like a s-s-sword, with a gold handle and a s-silver blade—"

"Stop stuttering!"

Namine flinched at Larxene's outburst. "S-sorry—" She cut herself off at her friend's dangerous look, and dug her nails into her palms as much as she could withstand. Namine decided to stare at the floor in hopes that it would help. "It was important. I felt like everyone wanted it, even some of the friends I had before," The pointed remarks of the boy with silver hair quickly came to mind. "But there were times I didn't even really want the thing, though it was rare. I—I felt like it brought me more grief sometimes than it brought me joy. It made me lose my friends. It made me lose my home. But without it, I felt like I would lose everything, and that everyone else would lose everything too. So I kept it, and in the end it didn't even want me."

"He was asking the keyblade, dummy, not what you felt about it."

"Sorry! Sorry," She hastily replied, "The keyblade could do so much. I could do magic with it, I even managed to freeze a ship solid with it once with the help of the duck friend I mentioned, Donald, and I used it to heal or lock doors. Or unlock them. But mostly I—"

"Used it to lock keyholes," Marluxia finished. "And free Hearts."

"Y-yes, for the heartless," Namine continued, "B-but at the end, I got it to transform! This Fairy Godmother gave me some magic charm to use to fight that really bad guy at my home island, she said something about it giving me inspiration, and I tied it to the keychain ring when everything I tried before was useless against him. It turned into this," She still recalled the design as clearly as anything. It was so lovely that Namine had fallen in love with it immediately. "This beautiful keyblade with two blades that came together, ending in a star-like tooth with a Heart just beside it. Its handles looked like wings, and it was all ivory and yellow with the most perfect touch of blue. It was breathtaking. And the fight went a lot better after that."

"Better how?" Axel asked.

Namine shrugged. "My magic was a lot more powerful with it like that," She recalled the way spells had shot out from the end of the keyblade so much easier than they ever had before, to the point where it felt a though the magic was casting itself from time to time. "Faster, too. But I didn't feel so alone while holding the keyblade then. I felt like…well, i-it's a little hard to describe, but I felt like my friends weren't so far away while wielding the keyblade anymore. And that gave me the strength to keep fighting."

She stopped talking when she heard Marluxia sigh.

Namine cautiously glanced up to see that he and Larxene were visibly annoyed. Axel, meanwhile, had the same carefully neutral expression he'd held for the entirety of the conversation. "W-what?" She asked.

"Don't you think it's a little useless to describe your feelings on something, even if it's something as important as the keyblade?" Marluxia chided. "We need something we can use, Namine. We need concrete statements, or numbers."

Oh, right. That was true.

But it was Larxene this time, surprisingly, who spoke up for her. "Still, though," She snuck a sly grin towards Marluxia, "Can you imagine our luck?"

Larxene had only ever said that phrase before in reference to bad things. Usually about Namine. But the tone of her voice while saying it this time was unexpectedly positive.

"What do you mean?" Namine ventured.

Larxene's gaze was as sharp as her lightning. But this time, when she gazed at Namine, it was not with displeasure. Rather, it was with the most glee that she had ever seen from her. And by far more glee than she had ever imagined Larxene to be capable of.

"It's just that we didn't imagine w—the _organization _would be so fortunate as to have another keyblade wielder in their numbers," She replied with a quick glance at Axel. "Especially one as special as you!"

Special? Namine was special?

Namine was speechless as Larxene stalked over and swept her up in a hug. Her friends had never acted like this before, certainly not Larxene. Namine felt her knees go weak at the affection, and when she finally pulled away Namine found herself holding onto Larxene's wrist from where it held her shoulders a little too tightly.

But Namine couldn't care less about that. Her friends had never, ever been this overjoyed with her before. So what if it hurt somewhat? That was normal.

"Now," Larxene beamed down at her. "Tell us your latest memory."

* * *

**SORA**

_Day Twenty-Four_

_"I still mean it," Dream-Riku said eventually, quietly enough that the words felt more as though they were intended for himself than her. "All of it."_

_"Huh?"_

_"I promised to protect you from the Dark, back then," She followed his gaze to see that he was watching one errant shooting star skew across its fellows' paths in the dream-sky. Dream-Riku grimaced. "I…broke that promise. But when we're together again, I'll make a new one. I swear. And this time I'll keep it."_

_Th-THUMP!_

She was forced awake at the feeling of her Heart giving one great, violent squeeze.

Sora clutched a hand to her chest as she flung herself up, and went still as she felt her Heart beat relentlessly for several seconds. She absently ran her other hand through her hair to shake out the grass as her pulse slowly settled back into its ordinary rhythm.

All was quiet. Not even the field made a sound as the breeze glided over.

Yet the dream had left her unsettled somehow—by all accounts it was ordinary, or as ordinary as she could expect aside from that weird pulse just now. And even that wasn't abnormal, for she'd been awoken with her Heart racing just as badly whenever she dreamed of sharp black claws and glowing yellow eyes, and the keyblade gone from her hand.

At least it was just a dream.

A raspy, pitched snore from Donald made her look over to find her friends still deep in sleep, and Sora couldn't help but crack a smile at the sight of him using Goofy as a makeshift pillow. Even Jiminy had joined in, using Goofy's hat as a sleeping bag while he rested his head on the velvet of Goofy's ear. His miniature journal was left open in front of him, and Jiminy had clearly been writing until the last few moments of consciousness as the last line trailed into a scrawl. Only Jiminy slept quietly, as Donald and Goofy seemed to be in an unconscious contest as to who could snore louder.

She and her friends had made camp in the field once the stars came out that evening, and their days spent in this field so far had been pleasant. None of them were sure where they were going—once they landed on the path they simply followed it without a word, and followed it still—but Sora didn't mind at all. And neither Jiminy, Goofy, nor even Donald had objections of any kind.

It was nice to have nothing to fight for once.

Nobody to save, nobody to stop. No worlds ending. Sora hadn't realized the stress she had been under until it was done.

She decided to wander off back towards the dirt path to enjoy the quiet. Being alone like this, with the night sky above and the grass fields rippling like the ocean, and finally being able to just stay in the moment without thinking of what came next, made it so easy for Sora to pretend like she was back on the islands again.

Her Heart squeezed again at a sharp pang of homesickness. It had been the start of summer vacation when her world had ended, with Riku opening the door to Destiny Islands' Heart to let Darkness in.

What was happening back home right now? Was it night-time for them too, and everyone was asleep as though nothing had happened? Did they go to bed, sleep through the apocalypse, and somehow miraculously remain unaware that they and everyone they loved had been trapped for weeks in the Realm of Darkness with all the other fallen worlds? Or were they awake and suffered for it?

Sora dearly hoped that wasn't the case. But somehow it hurt just as much to imagine that all her friends back home were waking up on another day with so much freedom and having fun as they should. They hadn't watched their best friends lose their Hearts or become possessed. They hadn't had to watch their home be corrupted into a battlefield for a fight to the death to save the worlds. They hadn't lost everything and very nearly lost it all again. She could cast magic now, sure, but all the healing spells she could muster couldn't erase the kinds of marks left behind by survival.

Maybe Wakka and Selphie were practicing blitzball with Tidus right now. Maybe Zell was off on some escapade again. Or maybe they were wondering where Riku and her were, and had by now noticed the remainders of their raft still sitting at the play island, completely unused. Assuming the raft was still there, that is. Sora hadn't recalled seeing any trace of it during that final fight against Ansem. But she had been a little distracted at the time.

Was Kairi there too? Or had she ended up back in her true home, Radiant Garden?

And then came a thought: Was her mother back home now? She had to be, there was no other option Sora was willing to consider.

But then again, if she _was _home, she would very soon notice that her daughter wasn't.

Sora would be in an awful lot of trouble once this was all over. She might even be grounded for the rest of her life. And if there was an afterlife, Sora would probably be grounded for the entirety of that one too.

Sigh.

"So she was right."

Sora practically jumped out of her own skin at the unexpected voice from behind. A man's, but nobody she recognized.

She turned, and nobody was there. Only thin air.

"What the—?"

"Do you know of what you've lost?" Sora was very quickly getting sick of this. She turned again to see the man blocking the path ahead, and just like Xemnas, he was wearing the exact same anonymous black leather coat. The hood was pulled over him to obscure his features further. "Do you know what little you have left? It must be terrifying to not even have the words for that absence. All you are anymore is what you hold in your hand."

"I have plenty!" She bit back. The keyblade came to her with a flash of Light as she readied for battle. "Stop screwing with me!"

"Riku," The man countered, and Sora went still. "Kairi. Mina. We can name every hole in your life. Can you?"

What?

Her mind whirled with countless questions, but the only one she could speak aloud was, "What are you saying?"

"Along the road ahead lies something you need," The man gestured behind him towards the endless horizon of the dirt path. "However, in order to claim it, you must lose something dear to you. Are you ready to pay that price?"

"I—wait—!"

"We shall await you at Castle Oblivion," The man bowed, and his hand reached out to summon a Dark portal. Seeing it prompted her to move before he could escape.

She raced towards the open portal just as the man stepped into it, and Sora leapt to try and catch him. He couldn't get away like that. Not when he even had so much as an idea of where her friends might be, or her mother. A dust cloud kicked up from the force of her jump and dirt mixed with Dark tendrils to block out the already meagre visibility from the night. Sora wrenched her eyes shut to keep grit from getting in them, and she reached as far as she could.

But it was of no use. Sora hit the ground with nothing but lingering curls of Darkness wrapped around her fingers and the all-too-familiar gnaw of worry in her gut. She jerked her head up only to catch the last of the Dark portal swirling out of existence.

The man was gone.

Again. It was happening again. Her loved ones could be in danger yet again and Sora had no choice but to take the bait.

Sora thought this part was over already. She had defeated Ansem, Maleficent, and had helped close the door to Darkness and saved the worlds. And yet she had gone right back to being that scared little kid chasing after the bad guys to save her loved ones like nothing had changed!

Sora dismissed the keyblade to ball her hands into fists as the impotent frustration came to be too much to bear. "Damn it," she cursed, and pounded her fist on the ground. "Damn it!"

"Sora?" She could hear Goofy's ambling footsteps approach. Sora got up to see him yawning while holding his shield halfway at the ready, while Donald was rubbing his eyes as a few lazy tendrils of flame disappeared from the head of his staff. Jiminy must have been in one of their pockets. "I heard a commotion, what happened?"

"You guys remember Xemnas?" At their nods, she went on dejectedly, "He's got friends. I think I just met one."

"What?" Donald squawked and spun around, his path marked by trails of flame as his staff roared right back to life. "Where are they? Lemme at 'em!"

He clearly still held a grudge from losing a few tailfeathers in that terrible fight.

"He's not here!" Sora answered quickly before Donald unwittingly burned off another pinion or two. "Not anymore, anyway."

"What did he say?" Goofy wondered. "I thought I heard him talkin' about your friends."

"And my mom," She shivered. Sora turned back to look at the expanse of the path the man had gestured at. "He asked me if I knew what I've lost."

"Well that sure don't sound good."

"Yeah. And he also said that 'along the road ahead lies something you need', but that I'd have to lose something to get it back," Sora recalled the ominous statement. "I was hoping we could at least have a bit more of a break before something like this happened again."

The trio sighed.

"Well, what are we gonna do?" Goofy asked.

"I guess all we can do is follow him," Sora looked to the end of the path where the man had disappeared, "To Castle Oblivion."

* * *

**RIKU**

_Day Twenty-Four_

He couldn't stifle his wince as he stepped through, and he reflexively clutched at his Heart.

It was beating so hard that it felt as though it would tear itself right out of his chest, and Riku guessed that it must have been the effects of the tethering charm that were responsible. It still felt a little too fast even as it was just starting to calm back down now. But Riku didn't care. If the charm worked, the benefit far outweighed such a small cost.

Because, well, Riku really had meant every word he'd said. Both then, and now. He would protect Sora from the Dark whether it came from within or without. They both had already fallen to it once and somehow, miraculously, lived to tell the tale. But Riku knew that kind of luck was so improbable as to be the stuff of fate. He did not trust it to work out on its own again. Not against those kinds of odds.

But all thoughts of the tethering charm were forced aside once the doorway's Light ceased to blind him, and Riku saw at last where it had taken him and Mickey.

The place hadn't changed a bit, with the unmade bed and the smell of old books from the dusty bookshelves standing along the wall. And that horribly familiar thorned vine motif snaking its way around the crown molding only confirmed the sight that Riku wished dearly was only in his imagination.

For they had landed right back in the middle of Riku's old bedroom in Hollow Bastion.

"What…?" Every detail was the same. The desk and chair remained untouched. Even the small glittering motes of dust still traced circles in the weary sunset light.

Wait a minute. Why was it still sunset? Hollow Bastion should have been returned to a normal schedule with Maleficent's death, wouldn't it? Or had they happened to come in at the right time of day?

Riku checked the clock on the far wall, and saw that it was at five minutes past midnight. He stared at it with a sinking feeling in his stomach.

But Mickey was only confused.

"Where is this place?" He asked as he walked towards the closest window, "I don't remember ever being here before."

"It's Hollow Bastion," Riku replied as he began to look back and forth between the clock and the windows. He really hoped the clock was broken. "In the old bedroom Maleficent gave me. Why did we end up here?"

"Aqua said the spell was supposed to take us somewhere safe," Mickey said doubtfully as he continued studying the courtyard outside, until he froze.

"Mickey? Is something wrong?"

He nearly recoiled from the window. "I recognize that symbol in the pavement!" He gasped, "The buildings out there—! Riku!" Mickey spun back towards him. "This is Radiant Garden!"

"Wait, _what? _You mean King Ansem's Radiant Garden?"

Riku did a double take at the view out the window, then. But even the view outside was exactly as he had remembered it. The copper veins that exhaled Dark smoke, the broken concrete of the courtyard's central platform that Sora and her friends had once landed their gummi ship upon, with the old washed out emblem of a four-pointed star over two leaves in the middle of the concrete. The long-dead flower beds overwrought with browned weeds. It had been in this state for so long that Riku had a hard time imagining it any other way.

After all, it had been his home for a short while. And for far longer than that, it had been Maleficent's seat of power.

In his time in the Realm of Darkness with Mickey and Aqua, between encounters with the heartless, Mickey had sometimes told them of his meetings with King Ansem the Wise aside from tales of his exploits with Donald and Goofy. The meetings were typically just brief interludes between Mickey's work on staving the spread of Darkness amongst the worlds, where the two of them could come together for tea and a decent conversation. Welcome respites from fighting against the heartless and doing the work of a keyblade wielder, neither of which felt as though it would ever end.

He had told them of a kingdom that teemed with life, color, joy. Where there had been smiles on the people's faces and hope in their Hearts. Yet what Riku had seen of Hollow Bastion—if it truly was once the Radiant Garden Mickey had spoken of—was about as far from such descriptions as it could possibly get.

One little line that Mickey had spoken earlier echoed in Riku's head in that moment: _"I knew King Ansem the Wise from before Radiant Garden fell."_

"The same one," Mickey furrowed his brow as he resumed inspecting the courtyard outside. "But he would have never let it get to this kind of state."

"I guess he didn't have a choice in the matter," He couldn't help but point out the obvious. King Ansem had been gone from Radiant Garden for over a decade before Riku ever set foot in this room, hadn't he?

Maleficent had never spoken much on the matter of how she'd came to reside in Hollow Bastion. And Riku had never asked. He had certainly had his moments of curiosity, all right, but as his work with her dragged on and Riku discovered the horrible truth about what he was helping her do, Riku found that he had all the answers he needed to figure out the rest.

Yet Maleficent, on the final day of their time together—that day where Riku's own hand was guided by Xehanort towards stabbing her in the back with the same wretched keyblade that Sora would take her own life with shortly thereafter—had mentioned that the heartless were already present in Hollow Bastion when she took over.

So who had put them there in the first place?

Once Riku recalled her statement aloud, Mickey's confusion only became more evident. "If it wasn't all Maleficent, then who could it be? Unless," Mickey faltered.

"Unless what?"

Mickey was reluctant to say his next words. "Y'know how I told you before on some of the stuff me and King Ansem talked about? Like theories and the gummi blocks?" At Riku's nod he went on, "I'm not sure we were always the only ones there."

"What do you mean?"

He gave no response to Riku's question but a squirm, and another guilt-ridden peek out the window.

This couldn't be good.

"Mickey," He said slowly, "What did you do?"

"Nothing! Nothing on purpose, I swear!"

But Riku only squinted at him, and Mickey soon gave up.

"I really didn't mean to do anything," He fretted. "I didn't think of _how _Radiant Garden ended up falling to the Darkness at all until I saw this," Mickey waved a hand towards the window, and the haunted sprawl of destruction that lay beyond. "It's hard to explain. I knew Radiant Garden had been lost by hearing word of it around the worlds, but the stories never felt real to me before seeing it for myself now. Though I couldn't help but wonder sometimes if maybe, well, maybe what happened was because of what I did. When you told us of Hollow Bastion back in the Realm of Darkness, I thought you were telling us about some other world that had been lost to Darkness too. Not Radiant Garden!"

Riku's shoulders fell as he scrubbed a hand down his face. Unwittingly making worlds fall to the Darkness was a story that sounded far too familiar. But Mickey, in the short time Riku had known him, seemed like the kind of person who should have known far better than to ever fall prey to such a thing. Far, far better.

Unless he wasn't.

Riku couldn't help but steal a momentary view out the window and around his old room as well. Too many sleepless twilit nights here alone, being woken up by heartless to ready for another day of spreading destruction across the worlds. Too many days spent thinking he had been abandoned by everyone but Maleficent and Ansem, and only finding out the truth when it was far too late.

Not again. Never again.

"Tell me the truth, Mickey," Riku demanded. "The entire truth. Now."

Mickey sighed. "It started before I discovered Radiant Garden all those years ago; Something happened to make the barriers that used to exist between the worlds shatter, and that made a huge meteor shower for the world I was on at the time. I'd discovered that the shooting stars left behind these odd block-like things, gummi blocks, that were a whole lot like this star shard I'd used to use to get around. And from there I eventually figured out that I could make a whole ship with the things!"

He went on, "I thought the biggest threat of Darkness around the worlds then had ended with the conclusion of my mark of mastery exam; My friend Ventus had gotten overwhelmed with his fight, and me and Master Aqua tried to help him out. But it turned out Master Xehanort had planned to use Ventus to forge that same Dark keyblade he would later use you and the Princesses of Heart to make halfway, except Xehanort had gotten a whole lot closer to his goal with Ventus and that masked partner of his. Close enough to make this distorted version of it."

Riku wondered if it resembled anything like that Dark keyblade. Did it have the same barbed tip? The same colors? Or did its nigh-completion make for a whole new design?

"And something must have happened, 'cause not long later that keyblade went all haywire and me, Aqua, and Ventus were all swallowed up by this explosion of energy from the thing. Everything was swallowed up! In the aftermath I could only find the two of them knocked out in the lanes between. Terra had been busy with his own fight against Xehanort during our fight and, well, I couldn't find either him or Terra no matter how hard I searched. No word of them, no nothing. And from there until I ran into Aqua in the Realm of Darkness ten years later, me and Master Yen Sid could only assume Terra and Master Xehanort were dead."

"But after the worlds' barriers fell, I knew there had to be another threat underway," Mickey continued, "So I traveled from world to world to figure out what was going on and to try and stop it. But for years, even with the worlds left wide open by the lack of barriers, there was nothing outside of the occasional heartless or maybe someone a little too friendly with Darkness. It was nowhere near what me or Sora and the guys have faced lately. Most of the time it was peaceful, or as peaceful as you can expect with no barriers to keep troublemakers out."

"The broken-down barriers and your gummi ship," Riku surmised, "Was that how you reached Radiant Garden?"

"I reached it before then with the help of the star shard my master let me use," He answered, "That was how I met Aqua, when we worked together to save someone from some unversed. But I did use the gummi ship to go back to Radiant Garden a month after that last fight, to search for any clues for what happened to the barriers. That was how I met King Ansem."

"And helped cause all this?"

"I didn't mean to!" Mickey insisted. His ears drooped. "Master Yen Sid always warned me about disrupting the world order all the time when I was his student, and I tried to take that lesson to Heart. I've never been much good at any transformation magic, Donald was always better at it, but when Donald wasn't around then I would try to keep to worlds with animals instead. I still do. But," He sighed, "The star shard took me wherever it thought I needed to be, and sometimes that was on the riskier worlds. And later when I needed to piece together what might have happened to Terra, I decided to try retracing my steps. That took me back to Radiant Garden. Now, it might take another moment to explain how me and King Ansem met."

With that, Mickey recounted it as best he could.

_"I'm sure you're aware of how fortunate it was for you to have been found by me," The man remarked as he poured out a cup of tea and passed it to Mickey, who took it gratefully. "And not the guards."_

_Mickey distracted himself with his tea in lieu of giving a response. The man lifted a brow at him from behind the curling steam from his own cup._

_"You may as well state your business. If you're not another one of those wretched creatures like you say, then you shall not be in danger here. I will make certain of it. But silence will only condemn you."_

_He finally met the man's eyes. Whoever he was, Mickey thought to himself, he was smart. And the man had already navigated through the Radiant Garden castle with enough ease to suggest that he either lived here or came by often enough to practically live here, while the way people behaved towards him implied he had remarkable authority. Enough authority for them to not outright question the small shuffling figure that followed him; Mickey, hidden under a blanket the man hurriedly procured. Though Mickey could tell they had been curious. _

_At least the two of them had made it to the man's office without any trouble._

_"I'm here because of those things," Mickey admitted. "If, uh, if we're talking about the same creatures. Were they all sharp with red eyes?"_

_"Usually, yes. They have become a grave threat to the people, I've been working day and night to figure out how to stop them since they first arrived. What do you know about those beasts?"_

_"I know enough to know what causes them, but," Mickey hesitated. "How can I be sure that I can trust you?"_

_"And how can I be sure that I can trust you in turn?" The man countered. _

_He had a point. _

_"I guess you can't."_

_"Indeed. But lack of trust doesn't have to mean lack of cooperation," He replied. The man pointed towards the door and relaxed his stern expression into something far more exhausted. "Outside the walls of this office is an entire kingdom of people who have been affected by those creatures in some way. Whether they or their loved ones have been victimized by them, or worse. My people have known uncertainty. My people have known suffering. And I have worked to find a solution to every problem they ever faced so that they would never know such hardships again, for I love them more than life itself," He shook his head sadly. "But this…I cannot find a solution to this."_

_"Please, my friend," The man begged, "My people are my greatest weakness, just as they are my greatest strength. Take this confession as collateral, if need be, so long as you tell me the truth of this scourge."_

_My people._

_Those words spoke directly to Mickey's own Heart. He remembered the people of his own homeworld. He remembered Minnie. And he remembered his friends. It was part of the reason why he had sought to learn the keyblade and master it in the first place—because he loved his home. He loved his people. And he sought to defend both from anything he could. _

_When Mickey had become Master Mickey, he had sworn a vow to fight for the Light, and to defend all who resided in its Realm from any forces that sought to destroy it. But Yen Sid had taught him well that not all fights were won with a keyblade, nor did some of them ever require a keyblade or any weapon of any kind in the first place. _

_Instead, it was knowledge—and the wisdom to know what kind of knowledge to use and when to use it—that was by far the most important tool at a master's disposal. _

_The man had proven his need, and so it was that Mickey decided to help. They had common ground, didn't they?_

_"You said 'my people'," Mickey recalled with a smile. "I'm a king, too."_

_"You're observant, aren't you?" The man smiled back and bowed his head just slightly in greeting. "In that case, I may as well introduce myself. I am King Ansem the Wise, of this land Radiant Garden. But you may address me merely as Ansem if you prefer. I'd order the proper proceedings for court etiquette to greet you formally, but I don't suppose I'm correct in assuming you're no fan of the old pomp and circumstance? Judging by our rather, ah, haphazard start?"_

_Mickey laughed. "You're right. My friends insist on calling me King Mickey and all, but I've never been a fan of that. I'm King Mickey of Disney Castle, but please, just call me Mickey!"_

"Woah, wait, what the heck?" Riku outstretched a hand for him to stop. "You're really a king? Donald and Goofy were serious about that?"

"Well, yeah," Mickey—no, wait, _King Mickey_—confirmed uncertainly, "Technically. But I sure haven't done much ruling, what with being away from home so much."

"What do you mean that you're only technically a king? How does that work?" Riku stopped himself as a thought occurred to him. "I don't have to curtsy to you or something, do I? Or is that something only girls do?"

He hoped not. Riku really didn't want to curtsy to anyone.

"No! No, no, please," King Mickey pleaded, "I'm just a king by marriage, I've never had any court training like Minnie has! She's the one who does most of the real work of ruling—I don't see myself as a king at all!"

"But you are a king, aren't you?"

"That's why I said technically!" He cried, "She was the princess, I was just a boat boy before all this happened and me and my pals became musketeers!"

This was getting crazier by the minute. Riku's first impulse was to call the story fake, but King Mickey's reaction to the questions felt unusually sincere. It was easy to fake a story, but it was harder to fake the tone that story was told in.

"So you were a deckhand, who became a musketeer, who became a king," He summarized, "Who became a keyblade master."

This, of course, wasn't counting the increasingly absurd odd jobs Goofy and Donald had claimed to work alongside King Mickey during the short time they'd followed Riku around.

"Something like that," King Mickey said. He must have seen the lingering doubt on Riku's face, for he then said, "I'll tell you all about how I ended up here, Riku, but in return ya gotta promise me you won't call me king too. Okay?"

"Okay, I promise. But only if you tell me why you never so much as mentioned something that important."

"It's just like Ansem said back then, courtly stuff has too many frills!" Mickey shook his head. "I hate feeling like people can't treat me like anyone else. My friends still insist on calling me by my title, but I've given up on getting them to stop. I couldn't stand it if everyone called me that!"

"I guess that makes sense."

"Thank you. Now, I should probably skip to the important stuff," Mickey resumed.

_"Before I get started with discussing the unversed, you should probably know ahead of time that I might not be the last visitor you get," Mickey gave a nervous chuckle. He still felt afraid to reveal much more of what lay beyond this world to its inhabitants, even if Ansem was their king. But if Mickey didn't, then he could risk the world order even worse by not letting Ansem know ahead of time to take precautionary measures to maintain normalcy. This keyblade master stuff could be awfully complicated sometimes. "The worlds used to be perfectly separate from each other, apart from the occasional guest with the know-how to get around like me. But for some reason the barriers between the worlds broke down just a while ago, and that's one of the things I'm runnin' around trying to figure out how to fix!" _

_But to Mickey's surprise, Ansem only gave a knowing nod. _

_"Oh yes, I'm certain of that possibility. In fact, I've already had one arrival that may become quite permanent." _

_"Really? What do ya mean?" _

_"A young man who couldn't remember a single thing save for his name woke up in my courtyard a month ago. Am I correct in assuming the timing corresponds with the barriers you mentioned breaking down?" At Mickey's confirmation, Ansem continued on, "I took him in. He turned out to be a fast learner, uncannily so. I proposed one day that he join my apprentices in our work, to see if he could fit in, and it was as if he'd always belonged. His calculating nature has come in quite useful for a number of breakthroughs we've had recently. I was even thinking of making him the leader of my apprentices under me," Ansem sipped his tea. _

_"After only a month?" _

_"Certainly. He's either assisted in or led more experiments and drawn more positively correlated conclusions in that time than any of my other apprentices have in a year, proportionally speaking. It feels as though it would be a waste of his talent if I didn't give him the opportunity in a time like this. But his numbers may also be because of our newly opened inquiries into the—unversed, you called them?—the unversed's nature." _

_"What have you found out so far?" _

_"Very little aside from deductions of their capabilities. Which are of course quite useful for our guardsmen to better assess defense strategies, and to teach our citizens ways to fortify their homes and how to navigate any encounters, but frustratingly little on how we could take care of the problem at its source." _

_And that brought Mickey right back to that familiar quandary of how much to tell: He was already threatening the world order just by being here, with his unusual appearance compared to most inhabitants of this world. And he was threatening it again by letting Ansem in on his mission. _

_But if he were to tell him all he knew of the unversed's true nature, and Mickey had a feeling that soon he would need to tell him even more than that with the worlds' barriers opened to all kinds of visitors' impending arrivals, then Mickey would be committing something unthinkable; He would be telling Ansem the path to power. Even if indirectly._

_And Mickey knew well what the power of the Dark could lead to for whoever wielded it, for he saw it unfold right in front of him time and time again. And every single time, it had always ended the same. _

_In tragedy. _

_It certainly didn't help that whatever he told Ansem, Ansem would tell his apprentices. And who knew how much they might tell anyone else they worked with in turn? And who knew what those people would tell anyone else? This would be the biggest gamble Mickey ever made. _

_But on the other hand, if Ansem could solve the problem of the unversed, could he solve the eternal problem of the heartless? Could he solve any other mystery Mickey brought to him? _

_Could he solve the puzzle of where Terra went, and how to wake up Ventus?_

_The wounds from that last great fight against Master Xehanort were still so fresh. And never before now could Mickey recall the Light ever being in as much danger, not even Master Yen Sid knew of a Darker time than now. For all Mickey knew, he and Master Aqua were the only two keyblade wielders left across the universe. The Light needed every ally it could get. _

_Mickey inspected the walls of the office, where every spare inch was covered in charts and graphs and notes of all kinds. The desk was piled high with orderly stacks of memorandums, forms, and all manner of papers related to ruling and research. An outline for new construction on some sort of a power generator was sat right beside an incident report detailing increased unversed activity right in the same area. Mickey's initial assessment of King Ansem, now that he had some time to interact with him and take inventory of their surroundings, still held up. The man was among the smartest Mickey had seen in his travels. _

_And it made the decision easier to have it be so plainly obvious that Radiant Garden was, well, radiant. _

_In his very short time here, one thing became quite apparent to him about this world—the Light of its people. Though Mickey was a master now, he was still rather mediocre at the skill to sense the contents of a person's Heart. Though frankly even the best at it weren't much to write home about, for the most one could accomplish with it was telling whether a person was good or bad. Whether their Hearts were comprised of more Light than Darkness, or the opposite, and no more. But even just the short walk to Ansem's office let Mickey know that this was a good world, with good people. More Light than anywhere else he had ever seen. And that made him think that these people would make good choices with whatever Mickey dared to reveal to them of the worlds beyond their own to their leader, whose Heart was certainly amongst the brightest. _

_"The source of the unversed is the same as anything else I've fought," Mickey revealed at last. "The Darkness of the Heart." _

_Ansem leaned back in his chair and gave Mickey his full attention. "Does this Heart of which you speak have any relation to the organ of the same name?" _

_"No. They're only felt from the same place." _

_"Very well, then. Please, friend, tell me more of this 'Heart' and what may reside within it. The safety of my people is at stake."_

* * *

**NAMINE**

_End of Day Twenty-Four_

"She's definitely coming here, right? The keyblade wielder?" Larxene demanded Marluxia as she paced back and forth around Namine's room. Her heels clicked with every step.

"Yes, I talked to her. I'm certain I gave her enough incentive to come straight here as soon as possible," Marluxia answered, as unflappable as always. But Larxene's agitation persisted.

"Why the hell didn't they tell us she was this close by?!" She snapped. "I'd think it'd be pretty damn pertinent to at least say 'Oh, by the way, that one girl we chatted about? Yeah, that one, the one strong enough to destroy the superior's freakin' heartless? She'll be passing by, just thought you should know.' Ugh!"

"Withholding information like that is no way to run an organization, isn't it?" A rare smirk toyed around the corners of Marluxia's mouth as he glanced towards her, and Larxene fleetingly smiled back before her face fell back into a scowl upon seeing Axel. Instead of watching them closely, a habit of his that Namine couldn't help but notice whenever he was within sight of her friends, he was now just standing there looking off into space. Like he was mulling something over.

"Well, what? What is it?" Larxene spat.

The way Axel raised his head at her question made the whole action look like an afterthought. Like he almost hadn't noticed her speaking to him at all. "Nothing, nothing. I was just thinking."

"Thinking of what? Spit it out."

"Don't you guys think it's a little odd how Namine's most recent memory from her time as a somebody is from _after_ she became a nobody?"

"So what? Is that not normal or something?"

"No, it's not."

Marluxia didn't say a word to Axel's answer, and Namine vaguely wondered if she should be worried. Was it wrong to be able to do such a thing? Her friends sure liked that she could do it. It didn't feel wrong if it made them happy.

But Larxene was less than pleased. "Like you'd know. This whole stupid memories thing is a total crapshoot anyway," She muttered with a kick at the table leg. Namine remembered Axel's reveal of her friends' lack of memories, and she felt guilty.

"I'd know better than you," Axel countered.

"'I'd know better than you'," Larxene mimicked him, and immediately he opened his mouth to retort.

But Marluxia but in before either of them could begin another argument. "Whether or not it's normal has no bearing on how useful it could be."

They both stopped, and Namine could practically feel the electricity Larxene put off in the air. An uncomfortable fizz that settled on the surface of her skin. Her fingertips felt as though they were being pricked with pins from the inside out in remembered pain.

It took a moment more before Axel slowly closed his mouth and settled back against the wall.

But it was obvious that his apathy was only feigned now when he asked, "Why? You got anything in mind?"

"Wouldn't you?" Marluxia missed the way Axel's eyes narrowed when he turned back towards Namine. She straightened without a thought. "What can you see now? Where is she going next?"

Namine knew she wasn't to speak, only act. She found herself preferring that. She wasn't so good with words anyways.

She closed her eyes as she tried her best to remember again. Now that she had gotten a little more experienced, Namine had found that there were what could only be described as stages to the process of remembering; The first stage was the easiest to get lost in by far. An initial swirl of Light and so much color, where voices trailed in and out and practically begged for you to follow them. She wanted to, so badly. But this was important.

She reached a little farther, a little further. And then came the second stage—_"There's no way they could have gotten Riku, right? Or Kairi?" Sora turned to her friends for assurance. "Riku is Riku. There's no way they have him. Kairi, well," She hesitated._

_But Goofy only smiled. "Don't worry, Sora. Kairi can fend for herself now, you don't need to worry."_

_"I know, but I can't help it."_

_"Wherever she went, she's with friends!" Donald added. "They won't let her get kidnapped so easily."_

_"Okay, you're right! You're right," She conceded with a laugh at Donald's pretend-punching at the air to punctuate his statement. "I guess I'm really just worried about my mom. I never did find her during that whole adventure 'round the worlds last time. And I had to trust that she ended up back on Destiny Islands at the end okay, too. She _really _didn't get any fighting experience like Kairi got—d'you guys think she's okay?"_

_"Well, uh," Goofy and Donald exchanged a glance that was far more worried than optimistic, and Sora only felt her fear grow. But then Goofy caught her looking and grinned as best he could. It didn't help. "She's still with friends too, isn't she?"_

_"I hope so," Sora conceded. She might not have been back home in a while herself, but Sora distinctly remembered their elderly neighbor Esuna wouldn't hesitate to say something. And if anyone came to their door looking remotely like Xemnas and his friends—Sora had no idea who they thought they were fooling with those full-length black leather coats, they weren't subtle at all—Esuna would have raised a ruckus for sure. She laughed at the thought. _

Namine was getting caught up in the memory again. She had to concentrate. What was that far off building later on?

_A storm was building up around the end of the dirt path. The sky had slowly transformed from that starred velvet into an ugly bile-green, swirling with foreboding grey rainclouds over the course of their walk._

_It was an odd thing, Sora decided, that distant silhouette that lied beneath the green twilight; A crooked mountain that somehow managed to be both too tall and too short, too narrow and too wide. A peculiar shape that looked not unlike a pile of road-signs pointing in any direction one could imagine. To the past, or to the future? To what could have been, or what should have been? Nothing felt right, and everything felt wrong. Sora sighed._

She bit her lip as she left came to and found all three of them watching her intently. Namine decided to stare at the tabletop instead. "I-I can't see much. She's, um. She's still in that field with her friends."

"Are they walking?"

"Yes. There might have been a building in the distance."

"Describe it."

Namine hesitated. The chaotic shape of that place was difficult to put into words in a way that would be useful. "L-Like, um, like a bunch of other buildings put together?" She tried, "Pointy. I couldn't see much detail. Th-there wasn't much light I could see it with."

"The building was pointed?" Marluxia confirmed. She gave a nod, and he crossed his arms. "Surely it wasn't near Twilight Town, then. The sky would be wrong along with the architecture."

"You think they're going the right way, then?" Axel asked.

"Or they could be strolling towards headquarters," Larxene replied. "Imagine if the superior and the rest of those idiots got to her first."

The pause that followed thereafter did not belie any good will from Namine's friends towards the possibility.

"We will simply have to assume that the keyblade wielder shall arrive here," Marluxia concluded as he made his way towards the door. "Without delay. I had given her good reason to, did I not?"

"Of course you did," Axel replied as he watched him with a frown, "But where are you going now?"

"Downstairs. It would be good to greet our honored guests."

As Marluxia threw a lofty smile at Axel from over his shoulder, he put a gloved hand on the doorknob and opened the door.

* * *

**SORA**

_End of Day Twenty-Four_

She wasn't sure when the twinge in her Heart had begun. For all she knew, it had been leftover from the end of that dream. A quiet tugging feeling that pulled her forward whether Sora wanted it or not, and in turn pulled her towards the jagged Dark mass that could only be Castle Oblivion at the end of the path.

The trio did not speak much as they walked. The only sound around aside from the breeze was the muttered bickering here and there between Donald and Goofy, though Sora didn't bother to listen to whatever it was they were going on about. Not when her thoughts were cluttered with _Riku Kairi Mom_. That man was wrong—they weren't holes. Just because they weren't right in front of Sora didn't mean that they were gone. If Sora had to pick a word, she would have said absence, like teachers would say in school. A classmate being absent was only ever temporary, they would be back in a day or two.

Yeah, that felt better. Absent. Sora could happily name every absence in her life right now.

Kairi, of course, was the first. But just like a friend missing school for something small like a doctor's appointment, she'd be back in her life soon. Sora was certain of that. Even if the worlds were separate again and it was a question as to which world Kairi had ended up at, there was still that lucky charm that had brought her to Destiny Islands in the first place and made her Heart go into Sora's own that night when it all started. Ansem had said so. And sure, he was the bad guy and couldn't be trusted, but it had turned out that at least he was telling the truth about the serendipity charm Kairi had.

_And speaking of lucky charms_, Sora thought as she reached into her pocket and pulled out the thalassa shell charm. Its painted face stared back at her.

_"For the charm to work, you gotta promise me you'll come back after whatever happens over there so we can all be together in the end." _

Not only had Sora promised she would, but The Fairy Godmother had even imbued the charm with magic of her own. Magic powerful enough to help take down Ansem once and for all. And, hopefully, powerful enough for her and her friends to be together again even despite the barriers between the worlds.

And maybe even the barriers between Realms. Because Riku was definitely still trapped with King Mickey on the other side of that stupid door somewhere in the Realm of Darkness.

Riku. That was the next absence.

At least it wasn't as if Sora had no practice for losing Riku, as messed up as that sounded. She had already experienced it with that final day of Hollow Bastion and part of the time leading up to then beforehand with their journeys across the worlds. Sora had, dare she think of it, gotten used to not having Riku there the way he had always been when they were kids—what had started off as adapting from necessity (for Riku hadn't been seen at all until that fateful reunion in Traverse Town) had become an adaptation by choice. Specifically, his choice. Because he had wanted nothing to do with her but to take the keyblade she wielded.

And at that point, it had been Riku. Not Ansem possessing him. There was no mistaking the normal voice and appearance.

And knowing it was truly Riku that wanted nothing to do with her hurt. A lot. Losing someone whose presence had formed such an integral part of her life with such consistency felt not unlike being the last speaker of a language nobody else knew. A language formed of inside jokes and references that became the wallpaper to her days, a comfortably familiar backdrop to a home that stood with the pillar of knowing the one person who got it, who always understood even if you couldn't figure out how to say it, would always be there to hold up the other half. Until they weren't there. And the entire thing came crumbling down.

And sure, there had been The Beast and the little heartless there to soften the blow when Riku had left her behind that day, but it didn't change the fact that losing him to the Darkness over the course of that month had been a blow in the first place. And, well, if she had to continue the analogy some more, none of the friends she had made on this journey at all spoke the same language that she and Riku did no matter how close they got. It was just a different dialect at best. But at least that made the absence not hurt so bad, especially in that short time of being alone in Hollow Bastion.

She and her friends were coming up on Castle Oblivion now. They had to be. The jumbled design of the place at the end of the path here was the only thing around that warranted such a name, and it helped that even the path itself was now barren of any fields or life of any kind except for them. The dirt path had become little more than a strange floating platform, now, with an increasingly tenuous connection to the fields they had walked before. Sora looked back. She saw only the floating path and the swirling green sky.

She resisted the urge to regret following that man down the path.

_He could have mom_, Sora reminded herself. He had even mentioned her by name, along with both of her friends. And maybe knowing her friends' names wasn't so out of the ordinary, considering that he clearly had a connection to Xemnas with the uniform—and Xemnas had encountered the Princesses of Heart before, which therefore could have led to knowing about Kairi—and it wasn't far-fetched to think that more than a few people knew Riku by now. But knowing her mother's name was something else entirely.

When all Sora had to go on at this point was just belief that her mother had made it back home okay, especially knowing that her mother couldn't have had any experience with protecting herself like even Kairi did now, it didn't bode well that anyone other than her friends would have that kind of information. Or any information on her, really.

Sora called the keyblade to her hand for a moment to look down at it. For better or worse, she and the keyblade were stuck with each other now. Not that Sora truly resented it, as that short time in Hollow Bastion when it had abandoned her for Riku's hand taught her that perhaps it was better that the keyblade was with her instead, but…it was dangerous. Maybe not for Sora herself, beyond getting her into fights (and then thankfully helping get her out of them, or through them), but for the people she cared about.

Yet the keybade had chosen her for a reason. And with that thought in mind, Sora dismissed it from her hand and stared up at the towering doors of Castle Oblivion.

* * *

**RIKU**

_End of Day Twenty-Four_

"Okay, so if I've got this right," Riku could feel a headache coming on, "You told King Ansem about Hearts and Darkness, but mostly only of heartless and how Darkness was dangerous to limit any liability. And he decided to research Hearts and their Darkness as a result. Which didn't exactly go over well."

"Yup," Mickey said. "He said he didn't like the direction his apprentices were talking about taking the experiments in."

"Which all King Ansem knew about that was what they were willing to discuss in front of him," Riku reminded him, "Remember how he mentioned that anyone else in the castle didn't really tell him what the apprentices were up to by the end if your visits there, either? Like they were afraid or thought King Ansem already knew?"

"Well, yeah," Mickey nervously scratched his head.

"So King Ansem ended the experiments because they weren't finding out anything about how to stop Darkness at its source, and he got spooked enough to end all research on Hearts. Cue your later meeting, where King Ansem expressed concern about the apprentices and that their experiments may have been doing more harm than good, and at the _exact_ same time that he was talking about that an apprentice barged in to argue in favor of continuing the experiments."

Riku continued, "And that wasn't just any apprentice, but Apprentice Xehanort. The one King Ansem promoted to lead those experiments he later ordered to end. Xehanort saw you, when you look absolutely nothing like the people of Radiant Garden, and I'm pretty sure there's a good chance that he may have been listening at the door or something because that timing is just too perfect. And if he listened at the door once, what's stopping him from doing it again?"

Mickey opened his mouth to talk, and Riku raised a finger. Mickey stayed quiet. "By the way, interesting name there. 'Xehanort'? Some guy that showed up in Radiant Garden not long after Terra disappeared alongside Master Xehanort after that big fight, who had a resemblance to Terra, who went by the name of Terra's opponent, inexplicably showed up in Radiant Garden without remembering anything other than the name 'Xehanort'. Seriously?"

"I couldn't be sure! Only the general stature and the way he styled his hair was the same, everything else was different right down to the eyes," Mickey insisted. "I've never heard of eyes changing color before outside of transforming into a heartless until I got a close look at Aqua in the Realm of Darkness when there was enough light to see by. Apprentice Xehanort wasn't anywhere near a heartless at that point and his eyes were brown. I could only afford to be suspicious without telling Ansem everything that happened, and that would be telling too much. So I told Ansem to keep an eye out for him," He turned towards the window with palpable sadness, "And to check everything he could think of to make sure Apprentice Xehanort wasn't still going with the experiments anyway. That was the last time I saw Ansem."

The silence now was somehow both depressing and more than a little bit awkward.

It was depressing for obvious reasons. And it was awkward because of the simple fact that Mickey was a keyblade master. He was the best of the best, Riku had seen him fight. And Riku knew the contents of the vow that one took to be a keyblade master—to uphold the Light and fight for it. To defend the Realm of Light from any who sought to threaten it. Yet in the attempt to do both, Mickey had accomplished neither. In fact, he had accomplished the opposite.

Riku would admit that after closing the door to Darkness, he had had a bit of an idealized view of Masters Mickey and Aqua. Maybe it was because they were keyblade masters, or maybe it was because they were the first two people outside of Sora and Kairi that truly cared about him. But even when he had been annoyed by their efforts to keep him from fighting alongside them, they had felt larger than life. Half myth and half people.

But with this, Riku was starkly reminded that both of them were all people. No myth.

Aqua was visibly tainted by Darkness. Mickey was currently staring out the window onto a land whose fall to the Darkness he all-too-likely helped usher by accident.

Yet it wasn't as if Riku himself had room to judge.

Falling to the Darkness or helping a world fall to it were both things that he knew all too well. But unlike Mickey and Aqua, Riku had done both on purpose. He had chosen that. And no matter what Aqua said about it not entirely being Riku's own fault, that he was led astray by Xehanort and Maleficent, Riku knew that wasn't correct.

It was Riku that chose glory. And glory came to Riku in the form of the apocalypse. Glory came to Riku in the form of being trapped within his own body. And glory had almost come to everyone in the form of a monster that wore his face.

Riku had chosen that.

And Mickey, in comparison, had only ever been trying to do the best he could. Riku couldn't blame him for that. If they had traded places, what would Riku have done?

He would never know. But what Riku did know was that right now, he and Mickey needed to stay together. And he also knew that Mickey was wrong about one thing.

"Radiant Garden wasn't completely destroyed by Xehanort and Maleficent," Riku tried for a smile when Mickey turned back towards him. "There's at least one thing I know Maleficent kept in good condition."

"What's that?"

"The library," He remembered its unusually good condition compared to the rest of the citadel, aside from the chamber that once held the Princesses of Heart. Speaking of which, he never knew if they had gotten out okay or not. They must have, if Sora won. "It's got a few scratches, but she preserved its original condition. She never even put her personal touch on it like she did with the rest of the place," Riku gestured toward the vine motif along the top of the bedroom walls.

"It's really still the same from how Ansem had it?"

"I'd say so. The rest of the citadel was always Dark and half-destroyed or crawling with vine carvings and that green fire of hers. But the library was a completely different tone. Want to go see it?"

Mickey straightened with excitement. "Gosh, would I!"

Really, Riku was just trying to return the favor in his own small way for Mickey's help in the Realm of Darkness. There wasn't much one could do in exchange for more or less saving your life, of course, aside from saving their life in turn. But it didn't hurt to try and cheer Mickey up as he had done for Riku. And Riku had a feeling that Mickey knew he was trying to do just that.

Riku turned to his bedroom door and reached for the knob. And as he turned it, he thought back to that day in the library where he had asked Maleficent on where to find the puppet Pinocchio. Back then, he hadn't known barely anything about how Kairi had lost her Heart, or how to fix it properly. Then, he had thought that Maleficent could perhaps make a new Heart for her. How naïve he had been. But at least Kairi hadn't lost her Heart forever. Mostly because of that whole thing where Sora stabbed herself with the Dark keyblade to free Kairi's Heart.

He really did have a lot to make up for.

What were Sora's last words to Kairi back on that last day of Hollow Bastion? Riku could scarcely hear them over the turmoil of desperately trying to throw off Xehanort's control in time. _"Highwind runs on happy faces."_

He still couldn't believe that she had named her gummi ship _Highwind_.

Riku plastered on the happiest face he could for Mickey as he threw open the door, fully aware of how crazy he probably looked while doing so, before that happy face quickly slid off.

Because outside of Riku's old bedroom door was not the hallway like it should have been.

And it was certainly not the library of Hollow Bastion.

No. The sight that greeted them both beyond Riku's door was a dreadfully familiar one. Replete with broken stained glass windows and smears of light pouring down from a half-dead sun, where the ghosts of tapestries and fights long past left imprints and scars up and down the walls. Where once laid the entrance to the chamber to where the Princesses of Heart had been imprisoned, and the great dragon of Maleficent had turned to rubble. The place where Riku could remember so many meetings between Maleficent and her minions had taken place.

The chapel of Hollow Bastion. And standing in its shadows, wreathed in black, was someone Riku had been certain he would never see again.

Maleficent.

* * *

**NOTES**

HELLO! Hello, hello, hello! I suppose after so long away that I should cut to the chase and get right to it, shall we?

So just for the record, certain stuff in this fic like serendipity charms and tethering charms don't even remotely exist as part of canon lol. Anytime in the fics you see magic come up in any capacity other than battle spells like Firaga or Blizzaga and the odd FF spell, that's me! That's all me. Not Nomura!

I do this for various reasons like setting up for future installments/plot points (like so), mostly, but also because sometimes ya just gotta cover your ass as a writer lol. Nomura's propensity towards 'the power of friendship' as a catch-all explanation has to be reined in sometimes to keep things spicy and also internally consistent with certain variables. Even if Disney's whole schtick is the power of friendship! You can probably already guess correctly that the tethering charm is going to come up later on. Partially with Days, to explain a few plot points that come up in the game with Riku and Sora, but also to help make DDD even slightly more understandable as to WTF happens there. And, especially, with what I've got in mind for KH3. (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.)

NOTES:  
1\. So maybe you're wondering where my line of reasoning came from that it was kinda-sorta-maybe Mickey Mouse that inadvertently started the fall of RG and therefore the plot of KH1 (which in turn at least influenced the events of all that happened post-BBS). Here it is:

Looking at the relevant secret reports and that one cutscene in KH2, we know that Mickey met with King Ansem at least once (though I'm willing to bet that it was a few times, considering the tone of the conversation in that cutscene). We know that they discussed a variety of topics, and that Mickey absolutely must have discussed Darkness with him, because he discussed heartless and the doors to worlds' Hearts. And if he discussed heartless, he had to have mentioned that they came from Hearts fallen to Darkness. Ansem the Wise just so happened to have begun experiments researching Hearts and their Darkness around that time, purely by coincidence. Hmm!

Anyway, that same KH2 cutscene, we see Apprentice Xehanort interrupt the meeting, at the exact same damn time that King Ansem mentions worrying that his experiments may have caused the heartless problem, to argue that he wanted to proceed with an experiment regarding what we can safely presume to be the door to the Heart of RG (as Ansem mentions doors and "the heart of all worlds")! The timing is impeccable! And not only that, but we see that Apprentice Xehanort was clearly unsatisfied with King Ansem's ban on the subject and he absolutely saw King Mickey, who looks nothing like a human being or anybody else Apprentice Xehanort may have ever seen on Radiant Garden. This is confirmed with Ansem's Report 9, which we know Apprentice Xehanort/Ansem SoD wrote, also discussing King Mickey's reveal that he used the gummi blocks to reach Radiant Garden (which in turn must mean that either A, King Mickey met with the apprentices to discuss this stuff…or B, that Apprentice Xehanort was eavesdropping on the conversation, and therefore could have been listening in on any other meetings between Mickey and King Ansem. He was kinda writing under King Ansem's identity then, after all, and could've changed what happened to match King Ansem's POV). Also note that Ansem Reports 9 + 11 are directly connected.

But it also mentioned that Mickey discussed the keyblade, which I can't imagine is a good idea considering you can tell the idea of the keyblade's power tempted the hell out of Apprentice Xehanort in Ansem Report 9. I've written too much already here for room for other notes, so I'll leave it at that, but hopefully you can see the gist where I'm going with this thought. Donald talks about the world order, doesn't he? And Mickey doing these kinds of things totally had to have broken it for RG.

2) Okay so Mickey totally looks like the bad guy here, and he does think he's the bad guy in a way because he blames himself for RG's fall by disrupting the world order. But really, RG in-fic (not in canon, we barely have a clue of how the cookie crumbled in canon) was marked for death the moment Terranort woke up in King Ansem's courtyard where there had been a persistent issue with Vanitas' unversed in that world. If anything, Mickey revealing the nature of Hearts and their Darkness just hastened the inevitable. King Ansem's experiments would have eventually led in that direction regardless because of the unversed's nature, and Terranort would have taken it to extremes from there once he got a sense of what Darkness can do.

3) Lightning leaves unique wounds called Lichtenberg Figures! They kinda look like trees and flowers. It's really neat! Since Larxene absolutely physically abused Namine at least once in CoM that we see onscreen, IMO it's not unthinkable to consider that at least Larxene may have hurt her in other ways as well to get Namine to obey, if not Marluxia as well. They won't get away with it, I promise. Though Namine's truly happy ending (since DiZ is a turd in Days/KH2 as well ಥ_ಥ) doesn't come about until KH3's fic.

4) Old lady Esuna isn't an FF character at all, but instead an FF healing spell. I was trying to come up with some crotchety old person character from FF/KH/Disney that would fit in Sora's DI neighborhood I imagined and I was having trouble, so then I just started throwing any names around to see what felt right. It's ironic that the esuna spell was used to cure the 'old' status ailment back in FFV, and that it's a light-based spell.


	3. Chapter 2: Cost of Entry

So...how's the apocalypse treating you guys? I'd give it about a 1.2/10 so far, for me! I'm not sure what to say that'll properly convey just how apologetic I am for my absence and any false hope I'd given you, but do know that I have been reading everyone's comments and keeping you all on my mind all this time!

Alright, I'll stop now lol. If you're reading this while waiting in line to vote, **thank you.** I put out this chapter today as a treat for exactly that, actually! And also a sketch in the prologue chapter too (´•ᴗ•`") Thanks to selenity136 as always for beta reading and being emotional support asdfgh-and Thank you all once again for all your patience and gentility, and without further ado, enjoy the new chapter!

* * *

**RIKU**

_End of Day Twenty-Four_

He slammed the door shut.

For several minutes, it was all Riku could do to just stand there and stare at the spot where Maleficent once stood beyond the doorway, as if she wasn't dead at all. As if it were completely normal for the chapel of Hollow Bastion to have been just outside his bedroom.

Something was wrong with this place. This couldn't be Hollow Bastion, Riku was sure of it. This was somewhere pretending to be Hollow Bastion. Where the hell had Aqua sent them?

"Riku?" Mickey asked from behind him. "What did you see?"

Riku ignored the question for now in favor of turning around and leaning against the door, both to collect his thoughts and to try and mollify his terror by forming a blockade. Though he knew it would have been useless against the likes of her, if that Maleficent he'd just seen were real. Which there was absolutely, positively, no chance that it could have been.

_Are you sure? _A cynical corner of his mind murmured. _Sora came back. Why not her, too?_

He ignored that thought.

Riku's eyes roamed over his old bedroom again, or what he had thought of as his old bedroom, and took everything in with a new perspective. No longer were such things as the vine carvings in the walls or the spiraling rivers of dust in the sunlight merely relics from the Darkest time of his life. Not even the destroyed courtyard outside was free from his suspicion. Everything in sight had to be a lie.

Up on the wall the clock still declared the time as being five minutes past midnight. Riku noted that only the seconds hand had moved during his and Mickey's whole conversation, uselessly spinning in place. Another lie.

If Maleficent really was back, which she _wasn't_, then she was up to her old tricks.

"Riku?" Mickey tried again. He had almost forgotten Mickey was even there.

Riku balled his hands into fists, and felt his fingertips slide over the wood grain of the door as he did so. Everything, even the textures of this place, was the same. Except for that clock. And except for what laid just outside the door.

"That was Maleficent," He spoke in a rush, nearly tripping over his own words. "She's right there outside my room. She's supposed to be dead!"

"What? What d'ya mean, Maleficent's there?"

"There's supposed to be a hallway outside my room, not the chapel we met up in when I worked for her! And Maleficent's supposed to be dead! Not—Not _standing _there without even a scratch on her like nothing happened!"

Mickey furrowed his brow and put a hand to his chin, undoubtedly either devising some kind of plan for what to do about the not-Maleficent outside the door or thinking about the awful puzzle it seemed they both had landed in. Or, at least, Riku certainly hoped he was doing either of those things. The nervous flicking of Mickey's tail told otherwise.

What could they do? Riku had been no match for Maleficent even with the keyblade. Even with all the power that she had bestowed on him over the course of their time together, even with the power he had taken from Sora on that day, he had been nothing more than a child throwing a fit in the face of Maleficent's might. It didn't matter that he was the strongest and fastest of his friends back on Destiny Islands. It didn't matter that he had destroyed scores of her heartless in his training, and fantasized of one day seeing her dissolve into Dark smoke like so many of her minions. It didn't matter that all of her lackeys had been picked off one by one until Maleficent had slowly become just as alone as he was. It didn't matter that he had held the stuff of legends in the palm of his hand as he struck.

The keyblade itself had simply hit the barrier of her magic and went no further.

The keyblade. Spoken of as the harbinger of chaos and ruin, or as the ultimate force of good. Capable of destroying worlds, or saving them. Capable of killing Xehanort's heartless.

And Maleficent stopped the thing in its tracks.

Until he'd taken Xehanort's offer.

"I only won last time because of him," Riku said. Mickey tilted his head just slightly and Riku explained, "Xehanort's heartless. I took his hand and let him in to help me get another keyblade and defeat Maleficent. He did all the work. I was just the…the body."

"Riku—"

"And he didn't even finish her off. It was Sora who did that when that Dark keyblade turned Maleficent into a dragon. And Sora didn't even have her keyblade then!"

"Because Sora had her friends to help, Riku," Mickey cut in, "Just as you did."

"I don't know if I'd call Xehanort's heartless much of a friend."

"Of course he wasn't, but Sora was. You needed the help of your friends to defeat Maleficent, and that's exactly what Sora did! Think about it, Riku: In a way, the two of you worked together to take her down. Even if you didn't do it side by side, you did your part and she did hers. You worked together!"

"But Mickey," Riku sagged against the door. "I could only do my part because I let Xehanort into my Heart."

"Well, I guess you could kinda say that was like getting a friend's help, too," Mickey hesitated, "If only because you thought he was your friend at the time. I'm not saying that was a good idea at all, but I am saying my point still stands, Riku. Remember what Sora told you? 'Our friends are our power.' I know that nobody, not even keyblade masters, accomplishes anything by themselves. Even if you think you're all alone and no one's around, you still carry people with you in your Heart. You use your experiences with people to guide you, and you use their wisdom to make choices and figure things out. You use the possibility of seeing your friends again to give you the strength to keep going. And you're not going up alone against Maleficent or whatever else is on the other side of that door, Riku. I'm here to help. We'll work together!"

Mickey called forth his keyblade to his hand to punctuate those words, and raised it high over his head.

_(together)_

_("I don't need a keyblade, Riku. And neither do you.")_

It was funny, wasn't it? A girl with no keyblade was able to make it through Maleficent's stronghold with nothing but a wooden toy sword and two friends by her side that she hadn't even known for a day. Not even Donald and Goofy had been there to help. Meanwhile, Riku, a boy who had thought himself the hero and turned out to be anything but, who did have her friends and her keyblade at his hand, ended up losing everything. Even the things he didn't know were possible to lose.

Not even the keyblade had been enough to save him from himself.

Riku looked away from Mickey's outstretched keyblade at a flash of brown at the corner of his sight. The wooden toy sword.

He chuckled. Of course it would be here alongside everything else just as he remembered—still leaning against his desk just as it had been since Maleficent had helped him forge Soul Eater. Before he'd gotten the spiteful idea to throw it at Sora's feet after he'd taken everything from her. That toy sword laid there as if it weren't part of so much Dark history between them, like this were Destiny Islands again and he'd use it again tomorrow for yet another spar on endless summer days.

Riku picked it up and felt the splintered wood bite into the pad of his thumb past his glove, as if it were still angry at him for abandoning it. Or for using it to hurt someone for real.

_("Stop trying that. It's beginning to get embarrassing. Here," The racket from the toy sword landing at her feet was the only sound he could hear in the long-dead courtyard. "You can go play hero with this.")_

When he'd done that, he hadn't even deigned to think of what she'd do with it. He hadn't even considered that she would do anything else other than sit and cry for a while and, a Dark part of him had hoped that day, soon learn her lesson and come crawling back to him. That 'lesson' in question, he had told himself at the time, was supposed to be a noble one: For her to remember her true friends—what _Riku _had thought of as her true friends, though for a very short list that included himself, he had turned out to be far less than deserving of the title. But just like the rest of his justifications for his actions on that day and the month preceding it, the truth was that such a thing wasn't really what he had been after all along.

For the truth was that Riku had wanted Sora to be the one who had been wrong, so that he could be the one who was always right. To be the one who was weaker, so that he could be the one who was stronger. To be the one who had no keyblade, so that he could be the one who did. All so she could go back to being that little kid that followed him around the islands, only this time she'd follow him around the worlds. Always behind him, always second best, so that he would never be last.

So that he could always have someone who needed him. Someone who wanted him.

He had taken away any means she had to defend herself in a nightmare like Hollow Bastion just so he could play the hero for a little while.

(For Riku, in that time, someone who needed you and someone who wanted you were the same thing; to him, there was no 'want' without a need of some kind. If they didn't truly need you, why on earth would they ever want you? He had hardly known anyone he wanted something from without also needing something from, and so the two concepts had become intertwined—and he had been worse off for regarding himself and everyone he'd met in such a way).

The wooden toy sword bit deeper into his thumb, and Riku welcomed the feeling. It distracted him from his stomach churning.

What would he have done if he were in her shoes that day? He wasn't sure. But, Riku thought to himself, maybe he had a way to find out. Especially since Mickey and Aqua had warned him against using Soul Eater again.

The image of a much-younger Sora came to mind, standing in the unnatural light of countless shooting stars and swearing to him that she didn't care about any drawbacks of the tethering charm they would soon undergo.

She had thought about that night over the years as much as he did, hadn't she?

Was that how they were able to connect? Bound by memory? Had the two of them been connected all along before Aqua's magic?

"If you're right," He said, "Then I hope Sora's with us when I open this door. Even if only in spirit."

"Of course she will be, Riku," Mickey replied. "And Aqua, Kairi, Goofy and Donald, any of our pals. Let them show you the way!"

He decided to hold his tongue on any rebuttals pointing out how Donald and Goofy were much more Mickey's friends than his own. At least Donald, anyway.

Riku cast one last look up at the clock, and saw that it now read half past midnight. He readjusted his hold on the wooden toy sword, and felt how its splinters didn't hurt quite so badly anymore.

And so, as he took one last breath to ready himself, Riku opened his bedroom door.

* * *

**SORA**

_Day Twenty-Five_

She had barely begun to reach for the front doors of Castle Oblivion when they opened of their own accord.

Sora recoiled her hand on reflex, fully expecting for there to be someone behind the doors waiting to ambush them, and Donald and Goofy's shifting from either side of her implied that they had been thinking the same. But the doors swung open farther with a grinding rumble that sounded ancient, foreboding, and nobody was on the other side.

Empty. Utterly empty.

She moved her hand to shield her eyes as a blinding light poured out from the threshold. It was a cold and sterile light, just like the kind that glared down at you in classrooms or doctors' offices, and she took her first few steps into the entry hall. Sora cautiously opened one eye past the overwhelming brightness to try and look around, and her friends followed her inside.

It was a beautiful place, despite how barren it felt—Hollow Bastion had, in some respects, been exactly the same way. Beautiful but devoid of life. Yet Hollow Bastion's splendor came from its echoes of departed life, a story of its people told in withered flowerbeds and torn flags. Shattered glass and a citadel that at times felt like a larger version of its monstrous inhabitants. Castle Oblivion's own grandeur, meanwhile, seemed to come from a uniquely manmade rejection of all life entirely.

It was the kind of place that clearly had been made by people, due to the fact that fully-furnished rooms didn't exactly appear in nature on their own, yet Sora could never imagine any person ever having so much as existed within them. She was reminded strongly of those movies set in the flavor of futurism where everything was too white and too sleek. Though Castle Oblivion's entryway lacked the sleekness, choosing instead to adorn itself with a row of columns and vases that each looked more identical than the last, carefully sculpted and unidentifiable coats of arms in between, it had just the same pale emptiness.

But Castle Oblivion, once Sora had set foot within it, was now just beginning to feel as though it wasn't quite so empty after all. Though there were no colors and no people in sight, save for her and her friends, Sora felt that unmistakable heaviness in the air like the prelude to a thunderstorm.

Magic.

"Do you feel that too?" Donald asked as he held his staff aloft. She looked over to see him and Goofy both watching the corners of the room carefully.

"Yeah," Sora bit her lip as another feeling became apparent aside from the presence of magic; the odd sensation of a pulling from within her chest that goaded her to walk further into the castle. She ground her heel to keep from moving. Could that be the tether dream-Riku had talked about?

"Hey Donald?"

"Yeah?" He didn't turn, still busy with scrutinizing the hall.

"What do you know about tethering charms?"

Donald straightened. "Huh? Well, uh," He used the top of his staff to scratch his head, "I know charms are a kind of perpetual magic you can cast on almost anything, like people or objects—I can tell this place sure is charmed down to the rafters—but you gotta be real careful with them!"

"Ahyuck, yeah!" Goofy laughed. "I remember one time when Donald aimed wrong with a cleanin' charm and got himself instead of his clothes! The darn thing plucked every one his feathers right off!"

Donald squawked. "You weren't supposed to tell anybody about that!"

But Sora and Goofy had already started to laugh. And as their din echoed throughout the room, even Jiminy's good-natured chuckling could be heard joining in from his hiding spot in one of the many pockets of Goofy's jacket. The image of a Donald with the pink bumped skin of a plucked chicken was just too much. That is, until she imagined his tailfeathers stripped to leave only an angrily wagging sock of a tail behind. Now her face hurt from laughing.

She could hear Donald squawk again. "I'll show you—"

A lightning spell, maybe, or frost. It wasn't at all unusual for Donald to use magic as a form of rebuttal. But compared to the start of their journey, this time Sora was a little more prepared: She'd gotten long since used to Donald's antics, and let the last of her chuckling slowly subside as she lazily called the keyblade to her hand to prepare magic of her own in response.

If nothing else, it usually worked as a form of training. Competing against Donald in spellwork wasn't quite the same as competing against Riku back on the islands, but it worked well enough in the meanwhile, and Sora was glad for it.

But when nothing came, she and Goofy turned to see Donald only fitfully shaking his staff. He stared up at it with concern.

"Come on," Donald's concern began to visibly shift into worry. "Fire!"

Nothing.

"Stupid—Lightning!"

Not even a spark. Donald shook his staff again.

"…Lightning?"

Still nothing.

"What's wrong, Donald?" Jiminy asked as he poked his head out to see.

"Something's wrong with my magic," Donald fretted. He shook his staff again to no effect. "It's not responding!"

"The halls of Castle Oblivion are fickle," A voice answered from behind. Sora and her friends turned quickly to see the man from earlier standing leisurely by the entrance as the doors closed themselves of their own accord. "If you have a past, they shall treat it as they see fit. Whether they decide to magnify it, echo it," He began to walk towards them, and Sora could hear the smirk in his voice. "Or silence it. Such is the way of Castle Oblivion."

Her hold on the keyblade now was far from casual; Likewise, Donald and Goofy brandished staff and shield at the ready. Jiminy hid.

Sora angrily recalled their short meeting in the field. "Are you going to run away again or are you going to stick around and tell us what's going on here? What's wrong with Donald's magic?"

"The duck's magic was his cost of entry," The man replied.

"Cost of entry?" Goofy asked.

Meanwhile, Donald fumed. "Don't call me—!"

"Everything has a price," Though he was answering Goofy's question, the words felt directed at Sora. The man's face was still obscured by his hood, and yet Sora could sense that his eyes were boring right into hers. "And everyone who walks these halls must pay their tithe to Castle Oblivion one way or another."

He came closer.

"Not another step!" Donald shouted as he brandished his staff. Though truth be told, he did not make for a menacing sight without his usual magic making the top of his staff crackle around the edges. And the man must have felt the same way, for he then chuckled.

"Not another step? Well then," The man, still chuckling, raised his arm towards the empty air in a gesture the trio knew all too well—He angled his way into the Dark portal before it had even finished forming, deftly avoiding Donald's leap towards him in attempt to strike.

Where only minutes before the entrance hall had rang with the trio's laughter, now it had gone quiet. Sora and her friends were frozen in place, Donald with his staff still outstretched and Goofy behind his shield, and the keyblade still reared back in Sora's grasp. Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. For all of them listened carefully for any indications that the man might have stepped out elsewhere in the room.

And the only warning Sora got was one quiet footstep close behind them.

"If you insist," A voice hissed, and Sora spun in place to find him not even a meter away. The last few dregs of the Dark portal still trailed after him.

Sora flinched. She stumbled backwards into Goofy's shield, and the keyblade, now held so tightly in her hands that her knuckles had gone white, collided into his shield with a dull metallic noise. The sound echoed back to them from all sides of the hall to make for an eerie applause. And suddenly, Sora saw that Donald's staff was held out as far as Donald could reach to block the man from coming any closer.

"No cheating," Donald grumbled.

The man hmphed. "You do not know the price you'll pay. You, duck, have already paid once—"

"We've all already paid!" Sora interjected. This guy's similarities to Xemnas went deeper than just the clothes. Clearly, he had the same uselessly long-winded way of speaking too. She was losing what little patience she still had which, admittedly, wasn't much even on a good day. "We had to stand around and listen to your stupid face talk in circles because I thought my mom and friends were here. That's enough of a payment for you!"

"Yeah!" Donald added with a cheer, "If nobody's here, we're walking! Let's go, guys!"

The man laughed, and Sora rolled her eyes as she and her friends turned to march back towards the front doors. The man's laughter was the same as his speech—pointlessly refined. But unlike Xemnas, who was actually kind of terrifying for what little Sora had seen of him, this guy was just smoke and mirrors. She was sure of it. After all, why was he still wearing his hood even indoors? Ridiculous.

Heh. He really was ridiculous, wasn't he? He probably even drank his undoubtedly fancy-pants tea (and he had to be a tea-drinker, nobody put on airs like that without drinking tea too) with his pinky finger out.

And he probably still wore that stupid hood while doing it.

She and her friends were almost to the door now. Sora longed to be back outside again. That field was nice when it didn't have any ridiculously hoity toity, tea-drinking, pinky-finger-wagging—

A _snap_ came from far behind, and right before Sora's eyes grew a thick, thorned vine that wrapped itself around the door handles, barring their exit.

Of course that would happen.

Sora slid a hand down her face. She turned to give the man a scowl as her friends tried their best to pull the vine away without pricking themselves. "That's not fair!"

The man angled his head just slightly. "Is anything, keyblade wielder?"

She ground her teeth. This was one of those countless moments where Sora desperately wished she had even a fraction of Riku's seemingly endless comebacks, anything to stave off an unsaid admission that the man's words were true. She glanced down at the keyblade.

She had lost her home for the keyblade. She had lost her friends for the keyblade. She had almost lost everything she didn't even know she had for the keyblade, and even after saving the worlds—and getting everything back, and then some—Sora couldn't stave off the feeling that she'd still lost something she would never get back again. Something she could not put into words.

But, nevertheless, the keyblade had remained at her side. And if that wasn't fair, well, so be it.

By now, Donald had tried once more to call on his magic to burn away the vine as Goofy tried cutting away at it with the edge of his shield, and that gave Sora inspiration.

"Fire!" A bright coil of flame shot out from the keyblade as easily as it ever had, much to Sora's relief, and she shared a quick grin with Donald as they watched the vine blacken and die. Another attempt by Goofy, and the withered remains were beginning to break apart. She raised the keyblade to help him, until another snapping sound came from far behind.

Each of them gave cries of frustration and dismay as the vine repaired itself, and another grew across the door to join it. Another snapping sound rang out quickly, and another vine sprung up. And another, and another.

Sora whipped back to see that the man still had his hand raised, with fingers at the ready to snap again. She didn't have to see his face to know he was amused.

"Would you just—" _Snap! _"Hey!" _Snap! _"It's not funny!" _Snap! Snap! Snap!_

She balled her free hand into a fist. Sora began to raise the keyblade again and this time, she aimed it at the man. But before the fire spell she was preparing could be unleashed, Donald pushed down her arm.

He shook his head. "It'll be a waste. We can find another way outta here once he's gone."

"But he tricked us into coming here," Sora protested. "And how do you know there's another exit? You said this place has a bunch of magic in it, and he spouted off all that stuff about the halls using our pasts and being choosy or whatever. What if we can't leave?"

"King Mickey said there would always be a door to the Light, Sora," Goofy reminded her, and she could see Jiminy poking his head out to nod in agreement. "I'm sure that goes beyond just the Realm of Darkness!"

"And besides," Donald spared the man a suspicious glance before leaning in and whispering, "I don't think he was kidding about our friends being here."

"Are you serious?"

At that, Donald, Goofy, and Jiminy all nodded. "I can't shake this sense that King Mickey's around here somewhere—" Donald began.

"Gawrsh, me too!" Goofy added.

"A-yup, same feeling here!" Jiminy nodded fervently. "Like he's just around the corner!"

The pulling sensation from somewhere deep down only grew stronger at those words, and Sora decided to take it as a sign. Not that she was the superstitious sort—or at least, she'd never admit it out loud before and risk Kairi and Riku poking fun at her when they were around—but after that dream earlier, what else could it be?

And besides, Sora had been outvoted three against one.

She sighed.

"Alright," She conceded, and turned. The man was watching them from a distance, still with his hand raised at the ready to snap his fingers again. "Fine. Go ahead. Lead the way."

The feeling that he was smirking at them still, beyond the feeling of the tether calling her further into the castle, had never left. But now both had become overwhelming. Nothing good would come from them staying in this place.

But now they couldn't leave. Or maybe Sora could try…but then that would mean leaving her friends behind. Sora would never do such a thing. And the man had to have known that.

He began to walk towards the lone door at the end of the room, and the group followed.

And as they did, Sora realized there was yet another feeling that had joined the cacophony of the rest, that was both pushing her to run away and run further in at the same time. It was a feeling of foreboding.

A feeling that Sora and her friends were nothing but the mice in a Dark game against the cat.

* * *

**RIKU**

_Day Twenty-Five_

"I'm pleased to see your stage fright has passed," Maleficent declared as they approached. On her shoulder, present as always, sat Diablo. "I nearly considered knocking."

"You're not real," Riku gritted out. His and Mickey's footsteps echoed down the hall, making it sound as if there were more of them walking together than just the two of them. It helped Riku feel a bit braver than before.

"Oh? I certainly feel real."

"You're dead!"

"I was, wasn't I?" For an instant almost too quick to see, her expression grew pained as she raised a green hand towards her jaw. But then her wince faded into a judgmental glare and Riku was sure his mind was just playing tricks on him again. "But you came rather close yourself, child. I had warned you about Ansem several times, had I not?" Now even Diablo was fixing him with a glare. "Pray tell, however did you escape him?"

"I…I couldn't," He felt Mickey reach out to give his hand a reassuring squeeze. "Not by myself. I got away with the help of my friends."

"I see," She replied, "You did not get away as easily as you might think; After all, by that point your Heart was steeped in Darkness. It is no different now. That wretched man has left scars on you, boy," Her eyes slid down towards Mickey. "Be thankful that you've still got company despite your best efforts."

Had Xehanort's heartless really left scars on him? Maleficent may have been a liar, but that part felt too close to the truth. There was no way Riku could've gotten away from complete possession unscathed. He remembered all too well how it felt to want to run away, yet not having the legs to do it. To have lost the freedom he didn't even know he had, freedom he'd been searching for all his life.

But then, in a deeply messed-up way, Riku had gotten it back. Sort of. When Xehanort's heartless, still possessing Riku's body, had torn away the necklace Riku had stolen back from Sora.

When he had awoken as hardly a spirit in the Realm of Darkness with Mickey and Aqua.

The Darkness. Riku scowled at the reminder.

"I'm not thankful to have your company, Maleficent."

She tutted. "Come, now. You once turned to me to sate your hunger for the Darkness. And I know you hunger for it still. _You _called _me _here, after all."

"What?"

This time, it wasn't just Riku who said that, but Mickey as well. Maleficent nodded.

"Oh yes. You, Riku, wanted me here," It wasn't often that she addressed him by name. "You beckoned me, and I answered. I'm sure you've figured out that the architecture of my former stronghold is changed from what you remember."

"Now hold on!" Mickey called out as he stepped forward. "I don't remember Riku asking for you!"

"He hardly needed to ask aloud," She arched a brow at him, and Diablo looked down his beak at Mickey. "Haven't you noticed the spellwork in every corner of this place? Surely you did. You were the great magician's apprentice, after all," Maleficent sneered. "This place is a labyrinth. It is a living thing that stares into every corner of its visitors and rearranges itself to match. And I? I am but another fixture of its landscape. A landscape that you, boy, have shaped and populated. The only reason why I am here is because you wanted me here."

_("Then how about a fairy godmother?")_

Riku froze. There had been times in Hollow Bastion, in the twilit quiet of his room before he began much of any of the 'work' she would soon assign him, that Riku had pondered over those words. Hours where he had dredged up memories of a home that had only ever been a house, picking at scabs that were still wounds to this day.

There were more than a few times where he had turned those words around in his thoughts the same way one would turn a piece of candy around in their mouth. Where 'mother' had such a bitter taste, 'godmother' fared much better in comparison.

And it had fared better and better with every day…until Agrabah unfolded.

"Maybe there was a time when I was stupid enough to want you around," Riku tasted bile at the back of his mouth at the memory of Agrabah, and all of the horrible revelations that followed. "But never again. I know you would have done just the same to me as Xehanort's heartless did," He continued, "Because it's what all creatures of Darkness do. They try and destroy you from the inside out until you're either gone or turned into a puppet that'll do their bidding—just like how you made me do yours! I've been done with being your errand boy for a long time, Maleficent! All it ever got me was losing myself and everything I ever cared about! And if I wanted you around enough right now to call the memory of you here, then I can only imagine it's because I wanted to tear it out of my Heart and destroy it!"

Riku was so angry, so fueled by recalling those Dark days of her manipulations, that he had drawn out the rickety little toy sword he'd picked up from his old room (or, the memory of his old room) in preparation for a fight. And he was still so angry that he had no idea of how pathetic he must have looked.

Until Maleficent cackled.

"Good heavens!" She crowed, "You precious little hypocrite, you are just as much a creature of Darkness as I am if not more! Need I remind you yet again that it was you who took Ansem's hand and let him in, even after my warning? That it was you who continued using the Dark portals for sheer whimsy?" Maleficent shook her head, and still shuddered with barely contained laughter.

His face burned furiously. But before Riku could respond, Mickey stepped in.

"Riku only turned to the Darkness because he didn't know he had a choice! You and Xehanort's heartless lied to him and made him believe Light was the danger!"

"'Lie'?" Maleficent rounded on Mickey as Diablo bit out an angry caw. Her amusement had turned to something far more dangerous. "I haven't lied to that boy once, not ever, not even for a single thing. Oh yes, I've hidden some truths from him for as long as I could, and I shall not deny it. Nor shall I deny that I've stretched other truths almost to their breaking point. But for a mortal rat to declare that a fairy could ever do such a thing as filthy as lying—!"

"She's right, Mickey," Riku cut in. He met neither of their eyes as they turned to him. Instead, Riku stared down at his remaining hand as he called Soul Eater to it.

All those sleepless nights spent desperately wishing that Soul Eater were a keyblade instead. Days, weeks, going from thinking that Sora just hadn't come around yet and would join him soon enough, to hating her when she'd refused the Darkness time and time again and rightfully left him behind. To trying to take everything from her in the thought that she'd come crawling back.

_(there is no 'want' without 'need')_

That wasn't Maleficent that had planted that idea. And it wasn't Ansem, either.

No. That had been Riku, and Riku alone.

"In the end, I turned to Darkness because my Heart was weak," Riku confessed. "It still is. And I hate that weakness more than anything."

"Riku?" Mickey asked.

Mickey deserved to have Riku look him in the eye, he knew that. But right now it felt impossible.

"Ansem and Maleficent…they were just taking advantage of the opportunity. But I would have always gone down the path I ended up on the moment I saw Sora wielding the keyblade instead of me. It was inevitable. All along, I was my own enemy."

"But," Riku continued, and found the strength to raise his head to glare at Maleficent instead. Soul Eater disappeared from his hand as he gripped tighter than ever onto the wooden toy sword. "Seeing people like you embracing the Darkness makes me sick. When I find those people, even if it's just their memories," He vowed, "I'm going to take them out one by one. Starting with you!"

Maleficent drew herself to her full height. On her shoulder, ever-present yet hardly noticed in the squabble, Diablo grated out a noise quite like a growl. And together their eyes lit up with the hellish glow of the torches burning green on every wall.

"If you are to destroy anything in this place on your pathetic crusade, then you mustn't forget to destroy yourself last. For you and I are two of a kind; Dark and Dark alike," Maleficent jeered as her staff lit up like the sun, and she held it at the ready as Diablo began to dive forward. "But for now, you pathetic boy, make this worth my while."

At that, toy sword drawn out, he lunged.

* * *

**NAMINE**

_Day Twenty-Five_

_—Sora finished scrawling in the last few lines of the fishes she'd drawn on the wall of the secret place and turned to check on Kairi's progress with her own drawing. It was of her, Sora, and Riku all poking their heads out of a house, and Kairi was now adding little clouds for the sky. Sora grinned at the artwork. Kairi was the better artist, obviously, but Sora didn't mind. Because Sora could now reach the higher stones on the walls where previously only Riku could—_

The sound of a Dark portal opening in her room prompted Namine to hurriedly withdraw from the memory. She relaxed slightly when it was revealed to be only Axel, dragging his feet and sighing.

He shuffled over towards the new couches on the far side of the room. And upon reaching them, promptly fell face-forward onto the empty one in a graceless pile of too-long limbs and too-red hair. Namine gave a quiet breath of amusement to resist making a sound at the spectacle. Larxene was in the room, after all.

"Well," Axel spoke into the couch cushion, his voice muffled, "Vexen's pissed."

Larxene hadn't even looked up once at his entrance, and it was the same now. She boredly flicked through her magazine. "Tell me something new."

Namine flinched at the memory of piles of paper falling. Vexen's yelling. "Was it my fault?"

"Hm?" He unburied his face from the cushion enough to see her beginning to fidget with the edge of the tabletop. "Oh, nah. That little hissy fit was ages ago, Nami, he probably found something else to be mad at an hour later," Axel wrangled himself into something resembling an upright position just as awkwardly as he'd fallen onto the couch, and ran a hand through his hair. "This time he's pissed about that energy signature in the basement I mentioned. We were assigned here to keep an eye on it, but Vexen said it disappeared last night and none of his equipment could detect anything of it happening."

Larxene peeked at him from over her magazine at those words. "Now that's new. That iceberg's junk can pick up on Demyx's attempts to eat dairy from the other side of headquarters. Did the guys downstairs screw up with assembling it or something?"

Axel snorted. "Nope, we did fine. Even with that geezer breathing down our necks the whole time. This was something else."

"Tell me," Larxene demanded as she lowered her magazine just slightly.

Just then, another Dark portal opened. Marluxia strode in as he removed his hood with a flick of his hair.

"I managed to convince the keyblade wielder to continue into the castle. I'm sure it won't be long before she and her lackeys wander too far," He smirked.

"I've got some bad news, man," Axel replied, "She might not be as alone as we were planning on."

"Those 'companions' of hers are nothing to worry about."

"I'm not talking about the animals."

Marluxia turned towards him entirely and gave Axel his full attention. On the couch, Larxene lowered her magazine completely. "Tell me," Marluxia squinted.

Axel recounted Vexen's temper at the failure to get any data from the cause of the energy signature vanishing. "—But we went down there and saw it wasn't from the equipment at all. They were still working when I walked in. Turns out, and get this, the machines couldn't read anything because something was blocking them from _within the perimeter_. Somehow the castle created a whole damn room—it might have been two, I couldn't look in to check—and that, combined with the magic in this place already limiting the sensors, made it so that none of the stuff could detect the energy signature at all. Vexen's sure it's gone now."

The room went so quiet that Namine could've heard a pin drop.

Marluxia was the first to speak. "You're certain it created a room? Then that could only mean…"

"…Someone else with memories has entered Castle Oblivion," Larxene continued, "In a way that provoked its effects."

"And somehow without using any of the doors here at all," Axel finished.

They all went quiet again. The silence this time was almost twice as shocked as before. But now, it was laced with something Namine could identify instantly: Unease.

It made sense. None of her friends had spoken much of the keyblade wielder they had supposed was Namine's somebody. The girl who was interesting. The girl who had defeated the heartless of the superior, a mysterious figure whom they spoke of with equal parts derision and awe. But on the matter of Namine's somebody, they had only ever spoken of her with a kind of begrudging respect towards her accomplishments. Even if she was just as much of a kid as Namine was.

After all, they had never referred to her by her name once. Sora was usually only ever called 'the keyblade wielder' by her friends. A title had to mean respect, didn't it?

Namine didn't know what her friends had planned for her somebody. But she knew they were thinking of something, even if they hadn't said what it was yet. She recognized their whispering, the looks, their smirks. She had barely ever seen Axel doing anything other than watching the two of them closely whenever he was in the room.

But if the new arrival was anything like Sora, well. The unease told Namine enough.

Because it always meant trouble.

* * *

**SORA**

_Day Twenty-Five_

"Grip the door handle," He instructed.

"I am, I am," She muttered as she continued holding onto the handle yet refusing to open the door itself. Just do it, she told herself, it'll be just like ripping off a bandage. Who cared if she felt at odds with it?

"King Mickey and Riku are in here somewhere," Goofy reminded her. Sora felt her shoulders fell.

And after only one more moment's hesitation, she opened the door.

Her jaw dropped as Donald and Goofy ran on in—The sight of Traverse Town's First District loomed in the room beyond.

Every building was accounted for, right down to their particular fairy tale-esque style of white mortar with dark wooden framing. The same twin streetlamps beamed down onto the cobblestones, and the same gas lamps lit up the tables of the outdoor café on the square. But over them all the neon signs of the Accessory Shop and the moogles' workshop glowed with a pleasantly colorful light.

There was no ceiling in the room beyond as there had been in the entry hall; instead, a starry night sky appeared to extend far beyond what should have been the limits of Castle Oblivion.

"This can't be right," Sora gasped. This obviously had to be some kind of illusion from all the magic in this place. Though it was a very convincing one. "Traverse Town? How did you—?"

She had moved the door to talk to the man again, but he was gone. He must have left when they were distracted. And so, with one last glance towards the entrance door on the opposite end, its barrier of vines still in place, Sora walked into the illusion of Traverse Town and closed the door behind her.

It was a very convincing imitation. Even the sound of her and her friends' footsteps changed to match how she remembered them sounding on the cobblestones. Or, at least it sounded quite like how she'd imagine them to sound.

"It's exactly how I remember it," Jiminy said from Goofy's pocket. "Even the café's sign is the same," He pointed towards the folding chalkboard sign out front, still advertising the day's special in looped script.

"But the lamps are lit," Donald studied them. "Who would be here to light them?"

"Or to make sure they don't catch fire," Goofy agreed.

The blinking of the Accessory Shop sign caught her eye. "That's easy," Sora said as she moved towards the shop's doors. "Leon and the gang manage all that."

A part of her wondered if her friends would still be here. Nobody else was in sight of what little they'd seen of this imitation of Traverse Town so far, for some reason. What had it been that the man said about this place? Something about this place making the past weird? Or mimicking it? Sora supposed that Castle Oblivion decided on starting at the beginning of her journey last month, then. When she'd woken up here alone and knowing nobody. Maybe that was why all the people were missing?

"You're right," Goofy chimed in as he followed her up the First District's stairs. "It sure would be good to see 'em again."

"Wait you guys, d'you really think they'll be here in this Traverse Town?" Jiminy asked. "It's all empty."

"Why wouldn't they be here, Jiminy? It's right where we left 'em," Goofy replied.

"I, well, uh," Jiminy paused. "Now that you say it, I'm not so sure."

"That's not right!" Donald said, "We're barely into this place and you're forgetting what that guy said already?"

"Gawrsh, what did he say, Donald?"

"Something about imitating the past, which means," Sora answered instead as she grabbed onto the door handle and threw it open with an excited shout, "CID!"

And just as she'd hoped he'd be, there he was.

"Hi?" Cid chewed on his toothpick as he looked at her askance. The look only intensified as Donald, Goofy, and Jiminy made their way in. "Y'all are way too excited about some old knick-knacks. How'd you know my name? One of the guys on patrol out there send you?"

Did he get his memory messed up by this place too? Wait, he was supposed to be one of the memories, right? That only made it more confusing. Sora turned to her friends and found that they appeared just as lost as she was.

Or this had to be a joke.

Yeah, that sounded like Cid.

"C'mon Cid, don't you remember us?" She teased back, and her humor faded somewhat when she saw him look just as blank as before. "We met here! I came in all lost because I'd just landed here from my homeworld?"

"Whole lotta people come here from their homeworlds, kid, that's kind of how interspace travel works. Can ya get a little more specific?"

"Well, uh," She brightened as she got an idea. "'Kid', that's it! You kept calling me a kid and I kept calling you 'gramps'!"

"I bet I sure didn't appreciate you calling me that!" He grated.

"You didn't! But I didn't like you calling me a kid, either! But for some reason we kept calling each other that!"

"Now why would we," He pinched the bridge of his nose between his eyes in a well-known gesture of frustration. Just like how the real Cid would. Sora cracked a smile at the sight. "Alright, whatever. You guys all clearly know each other well, how about you tell me how you all met up here and maybe we can figure out how I factor into this little equation."

Wait, they hadn't said they'd met up here at all. Not in front of Cid. Did that mean…?

But before she could think on it more, Goofy answered. "I think she was helpin' me and Donald search for Pluto, right Donald?"

"Now who the heck is Pluto?" Cid shook his head.

"That's King Mickey's dog!" Goofy replied cheerfully, "He sent us on a quest to find Pluto so he could save the worlds!"

"A normal dog saving the worlds?"

Donald stamped his foot. "We weren't sent to go looking for Pluto, we were sent to find the keyblade!"

"And then what, was Sora helping you search or someth—" Cid cut himself off as he turned visibly perplexed.

Sora started bouncing on her toes.

"That's my name, you said my name!" She cheered, "I knew you remembered me, Cid!"

"I do," Cid replied finally. His confusion remained, however. "But uh, how?"

"Maybe I can help," Jiminy announced as he ducked down to rifle through Goofy's pocket, and emerged moments later with his journal in one hand and his umbrella in the other. Goofy picked him up and held him aloft as a takeoff point before Jiminy jumped down onto the counter, using his umbrella to slow his descent. "I've got it all written down right here in my journal."

But then a new voice was heard in the shop, coming from the front door.

"Woah, Cid, you didn't tell me you were throwing a party in here! I don't think your old mug has ever had these many customers."

"Yuffie!" Now Sora's bouncing around was threatening to launch herself into the ceiling.

"Oy!" Cid barked, "For the fifth and sixth time, damn it, I'm not old!"

"No cursing!" Donald scowled.

And Cid scowled right back at him. "Don't tell me what to do in my shop!"

"Guys," Jiminy was nearly forgotten on the counter as he nervously called out to them. Sora glanced over to see him rifling through the pages of his journal again and again. Something was wrong. "Guys!"

"What's the matter, Jiminy?" Goofy asked.

The room went quiet as Jiminy held out his open journal for them to see for themselves.

Every page was completely blank.

"All of my notes are gone!"

* * *

**NAMINE**

_Day Twenty-Five_

Everyone had left shortly after that revelation, of course, and left Namine behind. _(of course)_

It still stung a little, to be left out of the important things like that. She understood perfectly well why it was necessary, and that it wasn't the fault of herself or her friends, it just…hmm. Namine was a resident of the castle just like anyone else here. If there was someone unknown in here, who could be dangerous enough to be able to spawn whole rooms and doors in the castle where there wasn't any, and evade Vexen's detection while doing so, then it would've been good to know firsthand. Whoever they were, they were just as much of a danger to Namine as any of her friends. And Namine still didn't know any kind of ways to defend herself like her friends were so good at.

Sure, secondhand recounts of the discussion would work alright, but a nagging little corner of her mind couldn't help but wonder if her friends missed something. Larxene and Marluxia—well, she loved them and was so happy they kept her around, don't get her wrong—but they had a habit of leaving things out a lot. Things that Axel, thankfully, usually mentioned himself. But what if even Axel missed something? Something that Namine needed to know, especially about something as dangerous as this?

She wasn't sure. She knew she was only around a month old, so maybe she just didn't know enough to understand, but something about this didn't really feel right.

Oh well. She was probably just overreacting again. Maybe it was time to just rewatch a memory or two to calm down, hopefully she could gleam some sort of useful information from them in the meanwhile.

_— "K̷a̸i̵r̷i̶! That's perfect!"_ _S̵o̴r̶a̸ cheered and gestured between them as she explained to the girl, "S̸o̴r̴a̴, sky," She pointed to herself, "Ḵ̵͑ā̷̝i̷͇̇ȑ̸̙i̶̺͂, sea," She pointed to K̶a̸i̷r̸i̴, "Riku, land!" She pointed to Riku and stopped as she realized she'd never properly introduced him. "Oops, right," S̶o̵r̷a̴ waved her hand to try again. "This is Riku, by the way."_ —

Namine froze.

This wasn't right. Why were the faces beginning to blur? And the names, it was so strange. Like Namine knew the syllables were still just the same as always but somehow she could no longer comprehend them. She checked again.

_— "K̷a̸i̵r̷i̶! That's perfect!"_ _S̵o̴r̶a̸ cheered and gestured between them as she explained to the girl, "S̸o̴r̴a̴, sky," —_

What was happening?

* * *

**RIKU**

_Day Twenty-Five_

He had drawn that little toy sword at the ready and leapt when his world seemed to shift.

A flash of green, and everything blurred as Riku felt himself be thrown off his feet. A flash of white, just for an instant, and he felt himself smack painfully against the wall of not-Hollow Bastion's chapel.

He could hear Mickey calling for him. His already high-pitched voice had gone shrill with fear, and Riku dazedly gestured for Mickey not to worry. Riku was used to this. Riku had expected this, even.

After all, the last time he had tried fighting Maleficent had gone almost exactly the same way. But Riku refused to call on the help of neither Xehanort's heartless nor Soul Eater this time. It wasn't just that Ansem was a little too dead to 'help' right now, but that Riku swore to himself that he wouldn't use Darkness at all in this fight. To do so would feel like he was giving in to this memory of Maleficent. Even if he'd won, and a small part of Riku knew that he was up against some unlikely odds, to put it lightly, to win using Darkness would feel like he was acknowledging that she was right. And his pride refused to allow such a thing.

But Riku was beginning to hate his pride a little bit when he pushed himself back upright, and the ground felt like it was starting to swerve in response. Mickey loomed in his vision as he pulled Riku to a halfway seated position.

"That was far from worthwhile, boy," Maleficent's voice rose above Mickey's continued attempts to ask if he was okay. "It was hardly fit to even deem pathetic. Have you learned not to refuse my help now?"

He coughed. "Help? You were a mistake."

"If so, then I was but one amongst many."

"Then you were the worst!" He stumbled to his feet and wrenched his eyes shut against the vertigo as he raced forward, swinging blindly but feeling himself hit something. Maleficent laughed, and it only made Riku angrier.

Every heartless that he'd ever fought in training, every spar with his friends back on Destiny Islands, made for a muscle memory that he had learned over a lifetime. Stars danced across his vision as the vertigo tapered off, and in his imagination they became the glowing yellow eyes of heartless. This was just another training session, he told himself. Just another heartless, only he asked it to become Maleficent this time. Just destroy it like all the rest.

He saw a great flash of green begin to build from behind his closed eyelids, and Riku remembered a fear that was almost as old as he was.

One shuddered breath, and his swinging with the wooden toy sword went rabid. There was no thinking, no feeling, except feeling the dig and scrape of his _(pathetic)_ weapon against something that hardly gave. But Riku did not care. He only swung, and swung, and swung again in the wild hope that something, even a splinter, would hurt. A coldness bit at his skin.

There were flashes of blue and yellow now in his sight, and Riku saw that Mickey had joined him in fighting. A curl of bitter shame formed in his Heart—this was supposed to be Riku's fight. It had been his mistake. His enemy. And other people were paying the price yet again.

He swung, and still nothing gave.

"Remember the last time we fought, child?" Maleficent's voice rang out over the din of hers and Mickey's magic. "I recall another mistake of yours doing most of the fighting then, as well."

The barb stung.

"Don't listen to her, Riku!" Mickey gritted out as his keyblade struck across her outstretched staff with a shower of sparks. Riku could see Diablo flapping his wings furiously as he pulled at Mickey's ears.

Yet Riku couldn't help but listen. Maleficent had always had a way of being able to see through the very core of him, and this memory of her was just the same. All bark and all bite. He winced as he felt his skin begin to burn from the magic she and Mickey were hurling at each other.

The last time they had fought, huh?

_("Quiet, boy. The ends justify the means. You know this.")_

Riku flinched again, but this time it was not from any callous remark of Maleficent's. A whipcrack of pain sprung across his chest and he stumbled back as his knees buckled. He blinked. When had he fallen to the floor?

Another clamoring racket and Riku looked up. Mickey was leaping to unlikely heights as he swiped his keyblade again and again to stop Maleficent's staff in its tracks. Diablo had become a blur as he continued to swipe at Mickey with everything he had, and Riku could see him swipe at Mickey's ears, his hands, anything he could reach. But Mickey refused to be stopped. Shout upon shout of spells of all kinds, and Mickey—and Maleficent, in turn—was wreathed with magic. Riku felt it wash over him just from how close he was to the fight.

Riku dug his fingers into the floor. He was pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.

A lump grew in his throat and his eyes prickled.

He had been the best of the best on the islands, but _only_ on the islands. A big fish in a far too little pond. And in all the dreams of when he'd one day make his way off the islands, whether on his own or with the help of Terra who had never returned for him, Riku had never thought that he'd be anything other than the big fish wherever he went. He just hadn't considered it.

And when it happened, it was like a slap in the face. Even just seeing Maleficent for the first time that fateful day made him feel hopelessly outmatched. Doubly so when he'd later learned that his fated keyblade had gone to Sora instead of himself.

Riku had thought that things would improve once he took Ansem's hand. Heh. Riku was reminded every second of his existence since that day of just how horrible of a choice he'd made. But…well, Ansem had been right about one thing. He technically _had_ given Riku everything he'd asked for, and more.

So much more.

_"I think it's time for a changing of the guard, don't you agree?"_

_Maleficent gave no response save for a momentary twitch at the corner of her mouth. Disgust._

_And then, an explosion._

_To call the next moments a blur would have felt incorrect, for such a word suggested even the slightest slowness; Riku felt his body be jerked around by Ansem so fast that he barely felt it at all—A foot sliding on the ground here, a hand colliding against Maleficent there. It was like he was flying. The only things he felt for certain were the building pressure of magic in his veins seconds before it shot out of him almost non-stop. Like the buildup of lactic acid from running too long, or if his pulse were magnified to the point where every corner of himself could feel it. _

_And the constant pulling of his Heart shrieking (NO), but it was far too late for that to change anything now._

He was moving again. Riku wasn't sure when he'd done so, was he moving in time with the memory? Or was it the other way around, and the memory was moving in time with him? He couldn't tell. All he knew was that all had become a blur in both the memory and in real life.

"I had a feeling that our last meeting would not be the end," Maleficent's voice called out from somewhere in the fight._ Ansem's Dark keyblade met her staff in fireworks of green. _

_"Nor will this."_

_They both grunted as pinpricks of white-hot pain lashed out from where the fireworks landed. Riku could just barely hear Maleficent's biting frustration through closed teeth as the world went blurry again._

_The great stained-glass windows of the chapel swirled in his vision with green fire, and Ansem jerked his arms back when a rippling wave of magic scalded the Dark armor and burned it away. Riku couldn't help his morbid fascination as he watched it regrow like a tumor on his skin. _

Mickey's voice was yelling at him from somewhere. Riku didn't hear it, and he didn't listen. He was too busy watching the Dark armor grow back.

Maleficent cackled again.

_"The Heart of all Hearts, you called it," She called out, "You told me yourself that seven Lights would form half of the key, did you think your Darkness alone would be enough to finish the rest?"_

_Ansem did not speak. The Dark armor had recompleted itself by now, and Riku could feel the stinging buildup of lightning deep within, splintering into branches the longer Ansem held it. Pins and needles that were crawling down every inch of himself._

_An odd noise like a low, rumbling howl swelled around the duel._

"—IKU!" Something was jerking at Riku's hand, and he looked down. It was Mickey. He was saying something, but Riku couldn't hear him anymore. That noise had become too loud.

He could almost read the words on his lips. What was he trying to say?

_His own body—no, Ansem's body now—felt like it was made of television static. Maleficent carried on._

_"Ten years of work," She boasted, "And your _toy_ is no better for it."_

_The feeling of static grew stronger, and stronger, until it felt as though Ansem's arms were on fire. _

"It's exactly as I knew it would be, boy!" Maleficent's amusement did not stop as she let loose a comet of pure magic. And, as if it were in slow motion, Riku could only watch as it came closer and closer.

_And then, he let go._

_Riku hadn't even known that he'd done it until he noticed the pain in his arms was gone. _

_He'd fantasized for so long as to how Maleficent's death would go down that he wasn't prepared for it when it finally happened—an odd emptiness in his limbs preceding a cut-off scream. Maleficent. _

No, Riku realized, not Maleficent.

Mickey.

* * *

**SORA**

_Day Twenty-Five_

"Oh," Sora finally said, "That's, uh, that's not good."

"No, it's not!" Jiminy cried, "What am I gonna do? Oh goodness, I was supposed to be the royal chronicler, but if I come home without anything to show Queen Minnie—"

"Aw, don't worry, Jiminy," Goofy assured him with a pat on his tiny shoulder, "You know she won't be mad."

"I know, but it's the principle of the thing," Jiminy replied as he flipped through the journal pages. "All that work writing everything down and organizing it, but nothing to show for it? What if we ever needed that information for reference, like right now? I can't bear to think of all that history just disappearing!"

_("And everyone who walks these halls must pay their tithe to Castle Oblivion one way or another.")_

"Maybe this place broke your book or something, Jiminy," Sora piped up, and looked over at Cid. "Say, gramps, didn't you fix a book once, or something like that? Can you fix this?"

Cid snorted. "I've fixed all sorts of things. A frayed cover or a few torn pages are nothing for me to handle, but I can't just rewrite your whole dang book for you."

"I definitely remember him nearly rebuilding the gummi ship more than once," Donald deadpanned. "Can't forget that if I tried."

Sora balked. "Not even in a place that could be eating our memories? It was an accident!"

"There's some things I just can't let go."

"You really would let go of your magic before you ever let go of a grudge," Sora muttered.

She could nearly see smoke coming out of Donald's ears at the remark, but before an argument could start Cid held up a hand.

"Geeze, calm down! Have you two always been this hotheaded?" Cid locked the shop register and readied to leave, waving for all of them to follow. "Come on, let's try talking to Aerith and Leon about this. This mystery stuff is more their speed anyway."

The walk towards the old vacant house in the Third District was short and relatively peaceful one, aside from the occasional heartless. Which was somehow both surprising and unsurprising, though Sora couldn't figure out why she felt either way at all, never mind trying to figure out why it was both simultaneously; She could swore she remembered something about the worlds having been saved should mean the heartless should be gone entirely, yet here they were.

Eh, it probably had something to do with this Traverse Town just being one of her memories, anyway. At least that meant it wasn't so bad that Donald lost his magic. He could still use his staff as a club. Which made it much easier to dodge his wrath whenever Sora teased him, too.

But if this place was just another memory, then all of her friends in this place had to be memories too, right? So if she could remember them remembering her, then why didn't they remember her now?

Ugh. This place was beginning to give her a headache.

"Oy, Leon! Aerith!" Cid called out as they arrived, "Any chance you remember any of these knuckleheads?"

Leon looked up from his familiar stance as he leaned on the far wall, with his arms crossed and gunsword by his side. Beside him, Aerith turned to face them.

"No. Especially not that ninja," Leon nodded towards Yuffie with a ghost of a smirk, "Never seen her before in my life."

Yuffie scoffed. "Very funny."

"We all know you two remember that one, that's not who I'm askin' about," Cid replied, "I mean the other four here. Sora," He gestured towards Sora, and stopped short at the rest. "Sora and, uh…"

"Sora, Donald, Goofy, and Jiminy!" Yuffie corrected. Everyone turned towards her.

"Yuffie, you remember us?" Sora asked. Only Jiminy's name had been mentioned already in front of Yuffie. Yet none of the others' names had come up, Sora reminded herself, aside from Cid somehow remembering Sora's name.

But Yuffie shook her head. "Nope! Total strangers. But I definitely know your names somehow. It's totally weird, but it's convenient to spare the introductions!"

Leon looked puzzled. "You've never met them, but somehow you know their names? And you're not at all bothered by that?"

Yuffie shook her head, and Sora turned to Aerith and begged, "C'mon Aerith, do you remember us? Please say you remember us."

"I don't. I'm sorry," Aerith apologized with a wince.

"I—ugh, okay," She slid a hand down her face in exasperation and thought for a moment. She paced back and forth. "But you guys seriously have to remember us. What about the last time we saw you guys—when was that? Oh! Right! After we helped you take back your home from the heartless!" Sora brightened. "After the Fairy Godmother got us all together and did some fancy magic, and the four of us were about to leave to go fight Ansem, I was all 'Oh no! We'll never see each other again because of the natural order!' And one of you guys said something like 'We may never meet again, but—'"

"'—But we'll never forget each other,'" Leon finished, and his puzzled expression turned deeply perplexed. "…What…?"

Sora pointed at him with an overjoyed shout. "That was you! You said that! And you remember it!"

"I don't know how, though," Leon hesitated. "I don't get it, something's wrong with my memory. What's happening here?"

"It is strange, though," Aerith added, "I don't know whether to say, 'nice to meet you' or, 'it's good to see you again'."

"Exactly!" Yuffie chimed in, "Like we've never met before, but it still doesn't feel weird knowing your name."

"But I'm telling you, we _have _met. We all took on the heartless together!"

"I don't have any memory of that, but somehow I still know the events you're referring to," Aerith said, "I do remember Leon saying that, now, just as he remembers the words. But it's as if our Hearts remember instead of our heads. Like maybe it's your memories of us together that resonates in our Hearts, even after our own memories of those times are forgotten."

Forgotten? Sora felt hurt. Everything happened only a few days ago, by her estimate. A week or so at the most. How did they already forget something so important as how they got their home back? How could they forget her?

"You're saying that Sora's memories are affecting ours?" Leon asked.

"If that were the case then we probably wouldn't have forgotten anything, because she's remembering what we're forgetting," Aerith noted, "But her Heart could be affecting ours, and that could have something to do with the memories. The connections we make with people can have an unlikely power that goes far beyond what we can predict."

Memories, huh? "Maybe it's like that guy said, then. This whole town isn't real, it's just Castle Oblivion reflecting my past."

"And there's someone special to you in this town?"

The question caught Sora off guard, and she felt her face turn pink. She wouldn't call Riku _special _to her, definitely not, absolutely no way, but she'd happily say he was _important_. Yes, that was it. Riku was an important _friend_. He was her oldest friend. Her best friend, her favorite friend. That's all.

Saying he was her _special friend _was—um—well—

"Sure is!" Goofy said, and Sora felt her brain start to short-circuit until Goofy went on, "We're lookin' for King Mickey!"

"Yeah!" Donald agreed.

Oh, King Mickey. Right. She could work with that. "Y-yeah, and, uh, my friend Riku too. I guess my Heart resonated there and told you what we were here for, huh?" Sora finished with a nervous chuckle.

"Hang on, did you say this town was some sort of a castle?" Yuffie asked. Sora welcomed the change in subject.

"Yes! Yes, it's called Castle Oblivion. Giant from the outside," She spread her arms wide to punctuate her words and glanced out the room's window towards the night sky outside. "And I guess it's even bigger on the inside? Enough to fit all of Traverse Town in it, apparently. And the sky. We walked in through the castle's front door to some entry hall and talked to this annoying guy who blocked off the front door with a bunch of vines so we couldn't leave, said some vague stuff about how this place mimics our memories and takes things from us like Donald's magic or Jiminy's notes, and we decided to keep going on in because all of us could feel that Riku and King Mickey were here in the castle somewhere. After that, I opened another door in that hall and it opened to the First District."

"What in blue blazes?" Cid replied, "This has gotta be some sort of a dream."

"It's not a dream for us," She sighed. Donald, Goofy, and Jiminy all did the same.

Aerith gave a sympathetic smile. "You're still not sure what's going on yourself, right?"

"Right. We just got here, after all. I want to take a better look around and see if they're anywhere around here."

"We'll help you guys out with that!" Yuffie grinned, and everyone nodded in agreement. "An itty-bitty town like this, we'll find them in no time."

* * *

**RIKU**

_End of Day Twenty-Five_

Mickey shuddered as he clutched at his chest while the last curls of smoke drifted away from the scorch mark in his back, and the chapel of Hollow Bastion was filled with a wretched burning smell as the last of Riku's lightning dimmed. Somehow, Riku had managed to use the magic both in the memory and in real life.

Just as he had donned that Dark second skin in real life as well. Riku stared down at his hands with growing horror as he saw the ridges of his—Ansem's—old armor having returned. Along with all the danger it, and all powers of Darkness, posed. He swallowed hard against the urge to retch and felt his breath go shallow.

_(Sora's dead and never coming back, and it's all your fault)_

_("This place is a labyrinth. It is a living thing that stares into every corner of its visitors and rearranges itself to match.")_

This horrible place knew his fears as well as he did. As well as Maleficent did. As fake as it all was, the danger it posed was real.

Mickey started to slump forward, and Riku jerked himself out of his daze to catch him in time. Mickey weighed even less than he'd expected. Somehow, that made everything so much worse than it already was.

Riku could only watch numbly as Mickey's clothes repaired themselves as the wounds underneath did not. Was this it? Was it his destiny to hurt the ones he cared about?

"No," He spoke without thinking as he began to panic. "No, please, no! Mickey! Curaga!" Riku shook Mickey's shoulders as he tried to recite the healing magic Aqua had cast in battle. "Curaga! _Curaga!_"

And nothing happened. Just as the earlier memory of lightning had gone dim, so too had the vague recollection of those green waves of Light Aqua had called forth. He adjusted his hold on Mickey so that he was holding him with one hand as Riku uselessly yelled the word over and over again at the other. Maleficent, far too calmly, strode over towards the spectacle and kneeled down to inspect the damage as Diablo circled above and landed on Riku's shoulder.

It wasn't long before the word _curaga _started to come out stuttered, fitful, and still ineffective. But Riku didn't care. He said it until it lost meaning, like the syllables were just tumbling out of his mouth of their own volition, and Mickey writhed. The burning smell was still seared into Riku's nose.

_(ALL YOUR FAULT)_

"Fool. He knew that would happen."

He yanked his head up at her words. Maleficent looked almost bored as she continued to inspect Mickey.

"I didn't—I didn't mean to—"

"Didn't mean to what? Use your Darkness?" At Riku's silence, she chuckled humorlessly. "Then you are just as much a fool as him."

She got up and moved to turn away. "You're better off without him," Maleficent said. "The likes of us are not meant for the kind of Light he preaches, boy."

"D-Don't," Mickey rasped as he tried to push himself upright, and Riku tore his eyes away from Maleficent to see Mickey leveling him with an unusually stern look. "Don't listen to her!"

But whatever power Mickey's words and demeanor may have had was dampened by his wince. He curled in on himself as he clutched at his chest.

_(His eyelids drooped more, and he could just barely see the bottom of Maleficent's robes come closer as his broken skin healed. She knelt down and Riku could feel a hand in his hair.)_

"You're wrong," Riku declared.

"Hmm?" Maleficent held out a hand for Diablo to alight upon, and Riku dimly felt the raven's claws scrape at his shoulder as he made to fly towards her.

"Not only are you wrong about me being better off without him," He said as he glared up at her, "But you're wrong about yourself."

She did not turn, and did not speak. Riku went on.

"Before I fought you as Ansem, you healed me after I threw that fit when you took Kairi. I…I didn't know why you did that. You didn't have any reason to. But you did," He finished, "And I know you have it in you to do it again."

Maybe this Maleficent was a memory, and maybe the rest of this place was, too. But memory or not, this place and everything in it was dangerous.

And, he hoped desperately, maybe it wasn't all that way. If it could hurt, perhaps it could heal.

Maleficent turned, and her expression looked so carefully neutral as she stared back at him that Riku very nearly missed it; In her eyes was none of that green fire he remembered from the twilit days of Hollow Bastion, and yet no scheming and no fury, either. Instead, what lingered there was a hint of something Riku recognized but couldn't name.

And then he remembered that momentary wince she'd made earlier—the one he thought he imagined.

Was Maleficent capable of such a thing? Had he not imagined it after all?

Looking at her now, he almost saw that same trace of something vulnerable. Almost. But then Mickey writhed again and Riku made himself set aside the thought for later. "Please, Maleficent."

She did not move. For a long moment, long enough that Riku was beginning to think she'd refuse, they only stared at one another in a strange continuation of their battle of wills only minutes prior.

And, finally, she knelt down.

Maleficent reverted to her typical disdain as she assessed Mickey's injuries. On her shoulder now, Diablo shook out his feathers and started to groom himself.

"Fine, then," She spoke. "I shall grant you your wish."

"Oh thank you, thank you—"

"But in return," She put one hand on Mickey's chest and the other on the wooden toy sword still in Riku's grip, nearly forgotten in the aftermath of the fight, "You must do something for me. You didn't think I'd do this for free, did you?"

_That _was the Maleficent he knew.

Under her hand, Mickey squirmed and wheezed, "Riku, no—there's a potion in my pocket—"

"Come now, you and I both know the Dark seeker's magic well. Do you truly think one measly potion is enough to undo what the boy did?" She arched one brow. "All I ask is that he listens to what I have to say. And I do mean listen this time, and consider my advice," Maleficent turned back towards Riku with a squint.

"What is it?" Riku asked.

The hand Maleficent held on to Mickey with glowed as waves of green light washed over him, and what parts of Mickey's injuries Riku could still see began to close themselves up. A shifting feeling all over Riku's arms made him look down to see the Dark armor he wore begin to contort, moving in the direction of Maleficent's other hand that held onto the toy sword with such a strong grip that he could hear the wood creak.

He looked back up to see her eyes boring into his as she spoke next. "That there is no good sense in rejecting one's nature."

The Dark armor moved over himself as its tendrils reached out to ensnare the wooden sword. Riku bit back his panic at the sight; Mickey needed help more right now. Riku would just deal with whatever Maleficent was doing, he could figure out an alternative later.

He shivered at the feeling of the armor slithering down his neck.

"The sparrow flies, boy. The fish swims. The bear slumbers in the winter and awakens in the spring. And young children with burdens in their Hearts must understand their Darkness," The Dark tendrils covered more of the sword, and began to form a very recognizable shape over it. "Never run from it," He realized that as his Dark armor reached out to cover the sword, it was slowly abandoning him. His old clothes were showing through again. "And never hide from it."

The dips and points of Soul Eater's blade sharpened themselves as the last of those Dark tendrils unfurled to reveal its blue-green eye in the hilt.

_("All we are is poison.")_

"For it is a fool's errand to abandon the true self," Maleficent concluded.

* * *

**NAMINE**

_End of Day Twenty-Five_

Her friends had all come back from meeting with the others in the basement levels, but Namine's attention was far away from that. Her focus had been reserved solely for inspecting each memory she'd seen so far in search of more defects.

_— "I don't know how to feel about it," S̸o̴r̵a̵ replied, "Today marks the day that my d̶a̶d̴'̶s̶ been gone from my life longer than he's been in it. But I was so little when he died, that I didn't even understand what happened when my m̷̳̯͍̃̓͋͗o̶̫̅m̵̢̕ told me there was an accident and that he was gone. I thought she meant he was off on a trip until Riku explained what death was." "…That part never changes. You're never going to be sure how to feel about it,"_ _K̶̢͛a̶̘͝i̶̩͐ṛ̶̂i̸̘͋ finally said. They both went quiet after that. —_

_— "But what if we come back to the goldfish stall and the one I wanted isn't there?" S̵o̶r̶a̶ fretted as she and Riku wove their way through the crowds, their yukatas whipping around their ankles. "Then you can just win a different one. Now come on,_ _Ḱ̸̟a̸̼̾i̴̜͗r̸̞̚i̶̎ͅ said her ̶̬͛d̴̫a̵̞̋ď̷̰ would be done with the parade by now." "But me and N̴̩̄i̸̝͒b̴̩̄b̸͙̽l̵͔̀e̷͕͒ŗ̷͠ had a connection!" "You named it already?" —_

Every memory was beginning to go the same way. Names were starting to turn indistinct, their faces going out of focus. And the more Namine searched for flaws, the more there were to find.

She felt fear coiling up inside worse than usual. The very idea that these memories could change one bit was terrifying. Her old friends no longer having any names, any faces, to go with the connection they'd had that Namine savored was an awful thought.

"—Fine. If headquarters had nothing to say about the matter, then leave Vexen and the others to their half of the work. We'll simply continue to remotely monitor the keyblade wielder's group and keep an eye on where the intruders might come out from," Marluxia tapped the crystal ball in the corner of the room to punctuate his words, and the surface of it made a quiet _clack _as he did so. It seemed her friends had been in some argument before coming back, judging by their even more tense mood now than when they'd left.

Namine had noticed this just as she'd noticed even the slightest shifts in moods in her friends. It was a skill that had formed itself in the earliest days of her existence, and had come in very useful almost constantly. But at the moment, though, it was almost annoying. Her friends weren't yelling—yet—but their tone was clipped and their voices were becoming raised, and it set Namine on edge. She had to repeatedly stop whatever memory she was checking to note what they were mad about _(and whether her friends were close to getting scary even with Axel there)_ and if she had anything to do with it. And then go back into the memory once she made sure things were still okay.

Sometimes it made her lose her place, like now. She sighed.

Namine held her arms and looked down at the tabletop, as imaginary pinpricks of lightning tiptoed down to her fingertips. She was being unreasonable. It made sense for them to be getting so perturbed by the fact that someone unknown was in the castle. It didn't warrant her being agitated at all over something as insignificant as what volume or tone they were talking at. Namine just had to try focusing a little harder, like when she was trying _(and failing) _to learn magic.

That, and Namine was being extra unreasonable for preferring any past friends over the friends she had now. How could she do that? It was her friends now who took her in and gave her a name, and housed her still even when it was a risk for them to do it. Her past friends…well, as good as they were—great, even—they weren't here now. They weren't the ones sheltering her or teaching her magic. They weren't the ones who were there for her now. And that had to mean something, even if it hurt.

"It looked like that girl and her pets were about to come out soon when I checked earlier," Larxene smirked. "I wouldn't mind going downstairs to see how their little search went so far. It'd be better than hanging around here all bored out of my mind."

'Bored'.

Yes, Namine told herself. The friendships she had now had to mean something, no matter what. Even if they hurt.

"I'll be going down there to check on them, Larxene," Marluxia answered with a note of reproach, "Nothing extra."

"You said it, not me."

"We all know what you really meant, Larx," Axel scoffed. "The orders are to subdue the keyblade wielder for the Organization. Nothing permanent. Although," He added slyly, "I wouldn't mind volunteering for the honor, myself. You got to chat once already, Marluxia, I want to see the kid who defeated the strongest heartless ever."

"Me too!" Larxene insisted, and Namine could feel another argument start to brew. If she was going to say anything about what was happening, it had to be now.

"Her memories are starting to fade," She blurted out. Namine shrunk slightly when she saw them all turn towards her.

"What are you saying?" Marluxia asked. "That the castle is working on her?"

"Um, it's just, well, names and faces in her memories are starting to fade," Namine hesitated, "What does the castle do?"

"It'll erase your whole mind eventually, if you're not careful," Axel replied. "You'll be as good as a ghost wandering around these halls forever. It's one of the reasons why we wear these coats, to protect ourselves from the castle's effect and to let us use the Dark portals as much as we want without side effects."

Erase…her whole mind? Was that what was happening to Sora?

No more memories, no more old friends, no more anything. Not even her name would be left. The thought made Namine shudder.

Her being able to see those memories was the only thing Namine could do to make her friends like her again. It was the only thing that always made them happy with her. It wasn't like Namine was able to do the simplest things like summoning a Dark portal, or use magic. Memories were all she had. If she couldn't be useful anymore, what good was Namine worth keeping around for?

What good was it to be the nobody of the keyblade wielder, if the keyblade wielder in question was just a ghost wandering around the hallways?

And moreover, though Namine wouldn't dare say it aloud, the memories were the only entertainment she had. Like having a whole library in her head, where almost every book was her favorite. Or a whole art gallery where every inch was a painting. If Namine didn't have that, then she'd just be left sitting at this stupid table in this stupid white room staring at her stupid, stupid, _stupid _hands again—

Larxene gave a whoop and clapped her hands. "Yes!" She laughed and grabbed at Marluxia before hopping from foot to foot. "This is perfect!"

"Uh, Namine?" Axel asked, "Are you okay?"

She stared at him with wide eyes and struggled to form a response. What could she say?

"What—I—" She gasped, "I can't lose her memories. Axel, please. What are they so happy about?"

He searched her face before turning back towards Larxene and Marluxia, who had a rare smile on his own face now. "You know," Axel said, "I'm not so sure either. What are you guys going wild about?"

"We won't have to do any work to make her one of us now, duh," She giggled as she held on to Marluxia. Both of them had matching grins with a foreboding edge. "Won't the organization like that?"

Axel was slow to respond, and Namine could see he had that calculating look on his face again.

"I guess they would," He raised his hand to summon a Dark portal. "I guess they would. You two can stay behind to celebrate, I'll go down to check out the damage myself."

* * *

**RIKU**

_End of Day Twenty-Five_

Riku held out Soul Eater and looked at it with wide eyes. "This can't be the real thing."

"Oh, but it is."

"No, it's not! She's wrong!" Mickey yelped as he scrambled to his feet and yanked Soul Eater out of Riku's hand and angrily shook it, as if to try shaking off the Dark tendrils that had transformed it from the toy sword. When they didn't budge, he threw Soul Eater as far as he could, where it landed off in some shadowy corner of the chapel with a distant metallic racket. When it reappeared in Riku's hand only seconds later, Mickey tried throwing it again.

The second time it reappeared in Riku's hand, Mickey gave up and told him, "Don't listen to her, Riku! The Light will never give up on you! If you look for the Light, then you will always find it, but," He added with a glare aimed towards Maleficent, "If you look for the Darkness, then that's all you'll ever see."

"Well then," Maleficent bowed her horns with a simpering smile, "Are you saying the boy's Heart requires balance?"

Even the mention of that word made Riku wrinkle his nose with disgust.

"I think we all know the kind of balance you're talking about would've left me just aware enough to continue doing your bidding while keeping me too blind to free myself," He spat. "I'm grateful for your help in healing Mickey, Maleficent, but we're going to get out of here now. You're just a memory, and I hope you stay that way."

As he turned to leave, Riku saw out of the corner of his eye that Maleficent's smile widened at those words. He decided to ignore it.

Just as he decided to ignore her parting words: "I hope so too, my dear. Farewell."

Their footsteps echoed around them as they left, once again making it sound as though he and Mickey weren't alone in the chapel. But Riku didn't care. All he wanted right now, he thought to himself as he reached to open the door, was to be as far away from that illusion of Maleficent as possible. And as far away from the stage of some of the Darkest days of his life—

Riku opened the door, fully expecting it to open back into his old bedroom back in Hollow Bastion again. But all that awaited him and Mickey beyond the threshold was a blindingly white room lined with an array of electronics and tangles of wires, and they both stopped short at the sight and shared an uncertain glance. Despite himself, Riku couldn't help but turn to look back at Maleficent again.

Yet Maleficent was gone.

He sighed and muttered a curse at himself under his breath. Maleficent hadn't changed a bit; she was still thinking he'd be her faithful lackey as always, that 'balance' comment was but one of several examples of proof in that encounter. Like asking for something in return for healing Mickey's wound.

That wound which had very much been Riku's doing.

And really, technically even Maleficent's part in it was because of Riku, because his imagination had apparently put her there in the chapel. For some reason.

Wow, was he really just destined to hurt people or something? What was wrong with him?

Mickey had already walked into the room beyond and was busy looking around, but Riku lingered in the doorway. The wound on Mickey's back had long since healed by then, but Riku couldn't help but feel his face curl uncomfortably as his eyes fell on where it had been. "Hey, Mickey?"

"Hmm?" He didn't look over, as busy as he was with inspecting the equipment around the room.

"I'm sorry," At that, Mickey turned. His ever-present smile drooped at the expression Riku must've had on his face right then. "I'm sorry for hurting you, and for dragging us to that place. And I'm sorry for putting Maleficent there, and I'm sorry for using Darkness—No, wait, she said that was _Ansem's _Darkness somehow apparently, which is way worse—and—"

"Riku, it's okay," Mickey beamed. "I leapt in the way anyhow, so don't worry about it."

"But—"

"But nothin'! It's all fixed now and I'm as fit as a fiddle, so don't beat yourself up over it."

"Mickey—"

He held up a gloved finger and wagged it. "Nope, not another word there, mister!"

_Did he just wag his finger at me? _The gesture was so corny in comparison to the gravity of what had almost happened that Riku felt himself come close to cracking a smile. And Mickey must have seen it, for he then smiled wider.

"Okay, okay," Riku relented, "I won't bring it up again," _For now. _"But how are you able to just let things go like that? Even things that big of a deal?"

"Well, that one was easy because it really wasn't that big of a deal," Mickey replied. "You were aiming at Maleficent, and she was aiming at you. I knew you'd tapped into something bad because of all that armor, but I didn't think you'd had the know-how or anything yet to do any real damage. I thought it was Maleficent that was going to do something real bad to you! So I was plannin' to just try getting in front of ya in time to cast a shield against her and that your magic would take a little longer to fire, so I'd have time to prepare for something I thought would just sting a bit. I sure wasn't expecting that!" He laughed.

Riku could only blink. He'd already had an idea from their time in the Realm of Darkness that Mickey had a habit of brushing things off to keep the mood light, like telling Aqua that Terra would be okay when all signs at that point had seemed to say otherwise. But being able to dismiss your own near-death experience?

Was this sort of thing required to have enough Light in your Heart to make it as a keyblade wielder?

Riku looked down at his hands as his stomach churned yet again. The sight of Sora stabbing herself with the Dark keyblade and collapsing into Light replayed itself over and over again in his mind, just as it had countless times now, and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. Only now, it was joined by the sight of his own Dark magic striking Mickey in the back. That burning smell. What other horrible memories would be made and endlessly replay themselves in his head as time went on?

…Did Sora have these kinds of things to think about, too? Or Aqua?

Mickey must have mistaken his silence as being caused by a different line of thought, for Mickey then said, "Just because you shouldn't use your Darkness doesn't mean you're rejecting your true self, Riku."

He looked up. "But isn't that exactly what it is? Rejecting a part of me? Darkness is just as much of a part of you as Light is, isn't it?"

"Well, uh," Mickey floundered, "Technically yeah, but think about who's saying that! That Maleficent may have been a memory, Riku, but the real thing helped lead you to losing everything once already. You can't trust her!"

"She healed you, though. And all she wanted in return for that was for me to just listen to her talk for a second. Maleficent never does that. The only time she told me to listen to her about something, she—I—"

He stopped himself. _I ended up telling her where Kairi's Heart was, of my own volition._

"And think about _what _she's asking you to listen to her say, Riku. Maybe she doesn't lie, but she can tell the truth in certain ways to make you believe a whole other story!"

"Maybe, but not this time. You just told me that she was right about 'not rejecting my true self', as in rejecting my Darkness."

Mickey looked like he was struggling with an answer before sighing. "The easiest—well, the safest way of using your Darkness for good is learning from it. Not using it to fight like back there. Nothing good comes from using it to fight or anything else."

He had repeated the mantra a number of times and just as many ways in their short time together so far. Avoid Darkness, never use it at all costs, Darkness was dangerous, so on and so forth. All warranted, of course, as Riku had just been reminded once more. But this time when Mickey had said the words, he seemed to say them with a sort of heaviness.

"You sound like you speak from experience," Riku noted. Experience beyond what he'd discussed of Terra, Aqua, and Master Xehanort.

"I do, sorta. How should I explain…" Mickey scrunched his face up in thought before a look of inspiration dawned on him. He turned towards the door at the other end of the room and asked, "Say, Riku, did that memory of Maleficent back there say this place uses your memories to change itself around? And that that's how it looked like Radiant Garden's castle back there?"

"She did," Riku teased, "But I thought we weren't supposed to listen to her?"

"And we're not!" Mickey insisted, "But you know what I mean!"

"Yeah, yeah, I do," Riku replied, "So what were you thinking?"

"I was thinkin' I'd just go ahead and show you what I mean!"

* * *

**SORA**

_End of Day Twenty-Five_

"So, they weren't in First District?"

Sora shook her head. "Nope."

"Second?"

"Nothin'," Yuffie answered.

"Third?"

"Just some heartless," Leon replied.

"Merlin's house?"

"No," Donald grumbled as he lit their path with small fireballs as practice. It seemed that rather than taking his magic outright, Castle Oblivion had only taken Donald's memories of all the spells he'd known before. Which was still a crippling blow in Donald's opinion, as now Merlin had only had time to teach him 'the basics', which consisted of just the spells Sora knew and nowhere near the battery of nigh-countless spells he'd spent years learning and mastering. At least he'd still retained enough knowledge of theory to remember things like charms, when Sora had asked earlier.

And speaking of which, that tethering charm had come in completely useless here. While searching every inch of Traverse Town's districts, that feeling prompted her towards nowhere but further into the castle.

"I don't think they're here, guys," Sora said. Donald and Goofy shared their agreement. Under Goofy's hat, they could hear Jiminy's muffled voice do the same while he continued to inspect his journal.

"Shoot, I don't think so either," Cid scratched the back of his head as the toothpick in his mouth bobbed. "Ain't ever seen anyone 'round here like what you describe. Certainly no talking king mouse, either. Sorry, kid."

"His name is King Mickey," Donald huffed, "Get it right!"

"Don't worry," Sora said. "Maybe they're not in Traverse Town, but I know they're in this castle somewhere."

"Yeah," Goofy said cheerfully, "We had a feeling they were around here when we walked into, uh, what was it called again? Castle Obvious? Castle, um, Castle Vivian? Viridian—?"

"Castle _Oblivion_," Donald corrected. "And we should get going. If this Traverse Town is only one part of the whole place, who knows how long it'll take to search the rest?"

"Then follow your Hearts," Aerith smiled, "And no matter what shape the castle's reality takes, you can handle it. We may not remember you four as we should be able to, but we know you in our Hearts. We have a connection. Let that connection guide you and give you strength."

"'We may never meet again, but we'll never forget each other'," Leon repeated. He smiled. "That's what your Heart is telling us. Good luck, everyone."

At Cid's muttering about reality taking the shape of ridiculous dreams about searching for king mice in a town located inside of a castle, Sora laughed. This situation really did sound kind of surreal, didn't it?

It wasn't long after that that they parted ways. The goodbye was an odd one, given the unusual circumstances, though not unpleasant, and shortly thereafter Sora and her friends were wandering the streets of Traverse Town alone in search of a way back into the rest of the castle. She hung back as Donald and Goofy walked on, discussing with Jiminy about the state of his journal, but Sora's thoughts were elsewhere.

In particular, she was most concerned with Leon and the rest of the crew not remembering hardly a thing about Sora and her friends. How could they forget in such a short time? Only managing to remember their names and some trace of the friendships they've made together, but not remembering how that came about? What about the times they've together against the heartless? When they helped reclaim their home?

She stopped herself and looked up towards the rooftops of Traverse Town. That was right. Sora, Donald, and Goofy had fought alongside Leon, Yuffie, Cid, and Aerith to get their home back. She was sure of that.

But…where had that home been?

She couldn't remember. She wanted to say their home had been Traverse Town, but something about that didn't sound right at all.

"Sora?" She turned to see Aerith had come back, and now looked just as troubled as Sora felt.

"What's up?"

"I don't have any answers, but I felt like I'd needed to tell you something. Just a feeling I had. So, your memories created this town, right?"

"That's what the guy in the hood said earlier," Sora confirmed. "Castle Oblivion is using my past to imitate it for some reason."

"If that's true, then this town is just a figment of your mind," Aerith said, "And so are we."

"I was wondering about that, too," Sora gnawed at her lip. "But I don't like that thought. If you and Cid and everybody were there right in front of me, how can you be imaginary? How can this Traverse Town be some illusion if I can reach out and grab it?" She reached a hand towards the plaza wall, feeling the grit of the bricks drag on her fingers. She paused. "If I can remember you, why can't you all remember me?"

"Because I'm not really me," Aerith replied. "None of us are. That's the only explanation I can think of—Castle Oblivion itself is doing this to you. I don't know the reason for it, or if there is a reason at all. But I'm sure that I'm not the last illusion you'll see," Her brow furrowed into a look of pity. "Your time in this castle will be full of them. And I'm sure these illusions will try to deceive you and lead you astray."

"But none of you tried to deceive me or do any of that kind of stuff."

"None of us can know that for sure. Maybe the castle made you talk to us to sow doubt. Maybe it made you look for your friends in this imaginary town when it knew they were somewhere else in the castle, just to make you waste time and miss them."

"C'mon, don't say that. That's depressing," Sora winced.

"I'm sorry. But you need to stay strong, Sora, and beware your memories. Don't let any illusions distract you from what's truly important."

"Sora!" Donald called out from far behind. "Are you ready to go?"

She turned back to see him and Goofy walking back, with Jiminy now on Goofy's shoulder. They all appeared to be confused.

"Yeah, one second," She called back, and made to say goodbye to Aerith one last time. "See ya—"

But Aerith was gone. Sora blinked.

"—Later? Huh?" She angled her head to peek around the corner, but no one was there, either. And the rest of the Third District was empty. "Aerith?"

"What about Aerith?" Donald asked.

"Did you guys see her go anywhere? I was just talking to her."

"She walked away with Leon and the rest of 'em, remember?" Goofy cocked his head.

"You worried us, just standing there by yourself," Donald added.

Is this what Aerith meant? Sora inspected the Third District once more with wide eyes, but still it remained empty.

"You okay?" Goofy asked. She gave a hesitant nod.

"Don't worry about me," She pushed away her own unease so they wouldn't catch on. All of them had enough to worry about in this place, no need to add on to the quickly growing pile of concerns to deal with. "I'm fine, I was just messing with you."

Goofy and Jiminy chuckled as Donald tapped his foot with frustration. "Come on, then, let's find a way out of this place so we can keep looking for the king!"

"Okay, okay," Sora followed along as they resumed walking in search of a way out of Traverse Town. Or, technically an illusion of Traverse Town.

Which made her think: They came in here from the castle's entrance hall just by opening a door that led into the First District. A door that, by the time she'd tried returning to it while on her and her friends' search for Riku and Mickey, had already disappeared. Only the town gates were left in its place, and those led to the empty gummi hangar and the outlying fields. There had been no chance of returning to the halls of Castle Oblivion using the same way they'd entered.

Or was there? If they came here using a door, was leaving just as easy as using another door?

The idea made sense. Assuming the Aerith-illusion was right about this place playing tricks on them, then maybe it was distracting them even more right now by making them think they had to walk around the whole town all over again in search of a way out. How would she and her friends even know that it was a real exit when they saw it? Would it have a flashing neon exit sign over it, with arrows pointing to it and everything?

Or, Sora thought to herself as they passed by the entrance to the town's hotel, would it look like any other door you'd expect to see in the illusion? Perhaps it'd even be mislabeled.

Like putting a sign above it saying 'hotel' instead.

Sora turned on her heel and strode back towards the hotel door again, and started inspecting it. It didn't take long before Donald's and Goofy's footsteps went quiet.

"What are you up this time?" Donald remarked. "Messing around again?"

"Maybe," She joked as she reached towards the door handle, "Or maybe I'm onto something—Oh. Huh. Whaddya know, I guess I was right."

Sora squinted at the return of the overwhelmingly bright, bluish-white light that streamed out from the open door. Compared to the nighttime ambiance of the fake Traverse Town, lit by only the stars and gas streetlamps aside from the shop signs, the hallway of Castle Oblivion beyond was nearly blinding.

"Is that the way out?" Goofy questioned as he and Donald came closer.

"Looks like it just goes back into the castle proper," Jiminy supposed, "But hopefully we can figure out the rest of the way from there. Good eye, Sora. I wouldn't have guessed this was it."

"Neither would I," She said with a suspicious glance at the other door in the entryway. The hotel 'entrance' of the illusion-Traverse Town looked exactly the same as the one in the real Traverse Town did, right down to the orange light shining through the double doors' windows. And within those windows, Sora noticed as she looked more closely, she could see the ordinary scene of the hotel lobby. As if the bright white room beyond didn't exist. "I was just thinking on what the others said."

And on the other side of the door she'd opened, that was part of the hall, the doors didn't have windows at all. The stained dark brown wood of the Traverse Town side was white as snow on the Castle Oblivion side.

This place was getting more and more confusing.

"About reality taking another shape here?" Goofy said as he and Donald walked on in after Jiminy. Sora nodded and followed them.

"Something like that. This whole place is an illusion, it's easy to get swept up in it. Pretty convenient for it to put a door out next to us like that, though."

"I guess that makes two of us," A voice rang out from somewhere in the room, and all of them jumped.

Sora summoned her keyblade at the sight of the hooded man standing just beside the door at the opposite end of the hall, as the last dregs of a Dark portal fell away around him. Beside her, Donald and Goofy readied their weapons as Jiminy hid.

It took another moment for Sora to realize he wasn't the one they'd talked to earlier. This guy had a completely different build, as thin as a rake and twice as tall, and his way of speaking wasn't anywhere near as refined.

"Hello!" He raised his hand in a mocking two-finger salute. "Marly wanted to be the one to test you three after your little initiation into the castle, but I told him to quit hogging the heroes. It's not fair that he's the only one to get to see the great keyblade wielder we've heard oh so much about, huh?"

"Who are you?" Sora ordered. "Who's 'Marly'?"

"He really didn't even bother telling you his name? Classic, always putting on the theatrics," He mused. "Too bad it's my show now."

He reached for his hood and pulled it back to reveal a face as angular as he was, framed by a lion's mane of strikingly red hair. His unusually short brows scrunched together as a lopsided grin curled across his mouth as naturally as if it were always there, and Sora saw that beneath his green eyes—an icy, almost cold shade of pale green, like the first spring leaves frosted over in the late winter's morning—laid two dark violet marks like teardrops falling backwards.

He pointed to his temple. "The name's Axel. Got it memorized?"

"Uh, sure," Sora already had that hair memorized, apparently, because that shade of red was far too familiar. Where had she seen it before?

"Good. Now I'm gonna have to ask you to do me a favor here, Sora," He grinned as he held out his arms, and great spinning flames erupted on either end to reveal they were hiding two wickedly sharp chakrams clutched in his hands. "And that is: don't die."

* * *

**AUTHOR'S NOTES**

So, uh, holy shit! I'm not going to go too deep into it because I don't want to drag my personal life into the fic or get political, but pandemics suck. What an abysmal, Dark hole we've found ourselves in, huh? I guess, for a silver lining, this pandemic hysteria and potential impending collapse of democracy both domestically and abroad will go a _very_ long way towards informing my writing for RG's collapse-'write what you know' and whatnot :P So I'll just go right into the notes for this chapter instead!

NOTES:  
1\. the CoM manga gives an explanation for Donald getting his magic back shortly after losing it in the beginning by having Merlin teach him some (which would technically be Sora indirectly teaching Donald magic, since that Merlin was a figment of Sora's memories and therefore could only teach as much as Sora knew), which I thought was useful to appropriate here. The CoM game is kinda weird because it makes a show of Donald losing his magic in the opening, but then he just…gets it back when he's in your deck without any explanation :P So I'll just try to meet canon halfway by having him not able to do the fancier stuff you saw in parts of YABAM until KH2 and demote him to lvl 1 spells.

2\. Riku's saying 'curaga' and not just 'cure' like Sora would is because Aqua, by the time Riku encountered her, pretty much only ever used spells in the 'aga' range and up. Can't recall off the top of my head whether she does that in 2.8, but it's pretty much canon that she's a bomb-ass magic user and I'm stickin' to that!

3\. Now, about Castle Oblivion!

So as we all know from canon, Castle Oblivion was actually just Land of Departure after being transformed by Aqua using Eraqus' keyblade to protect Ven's body. And if I recall correctly, they say at some point that Land of Departure was Eraqus' ancestral home or something like that? Because Eraqus is revealed in KH3 to have been a 'blueblood' descended from the foretellers. I don't know, I'll try researching the ancestral home factoid again (and watch me turn out to be completely wrong lol) BUT even if that's not the case then I'm still rolling with that idea in this fic series solely because it sounds cool. Anyways! I imagine an ancestral home that has housed generations of keyblade wielders, and can transform into something like Castle Oblivion using Eraqus' keyblade specifically, is steeped with magic. Perhaps it was built that way originally by the foreteller ancestor themselves, a few charms and wards here and there to protect it, the usual, and definitely one heck of an enchantment to transform it into something like Castle Oblivion in times of need.

So we all remember Hogwarts from Harry Potter. With stuff like the changing staircases and the Room of Requirement, to the house dorms that had some very specific requirements for entry (as a ravenclaw, I would've sucked at those damn riddles lmao), the castle itself felt like its own character in the story sometimes. Really, most of the buildings in those books had their own quirks and personalities, and I loved that. So I decided to steal that here!

I'm sure the Land of Departure has seen many, many memories made there. Lots of students learning the ways of the keyblade, lives begun and lost, all that stuff. I like to think that the Land of Departure, being its own world (despite consisting of only the building itself), would therefore have its own Heart. And that so much magic being cast there both on itself and by students learning in its halls, combined with being a part of those students' lives, have made the Land of Departure into its own living thing in a way that other worlds usually aren't. After all, we get the idea in Days that making memories with someone helps them form a Heart, right? With Xion? I imagine that with a little bit of magic, Land of Departure has accomplished the same. Sort of.

Of course, I was thinking that Land of Departure and Castle Oblivion are two very different 'people'. Where Land of Departure is usually peaceful or makes a good-natured joke, Castle Oblivion can be cruel. Castle Oblivion is only ever used for a purpose, whatever purpose its summoner has in mind (in this case, to protect Ventus' body), and Castle Oblivion will do it to the best of its ability regardless of its (unwanted) inhabitants' wishes. It will look right into you and use that against you. But, if an outsider is good of Heart and open to listening to what it has to say, some can be fortunate enough to learn some very valuable lessons from their experience there ;) You'll see.


End file.
